


The Devil You Don't

by DaScribbla



Category: Crimson Peak (2015)
Genre: Domestic Violence, Emotional Manipulation, F/F, Gaslighting, Gender-Specific Slurs, Hurt/Comfort, Infidelity, Intra-Familial Power Struggles, Pregnancy, Rape/Non-con Elements, Sibling Incest, This Is The One Where I Address How I Really Feel About Thomas Sharpe, gay emotions
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-04-16
Updated: 2017-05-05
Packaged: 2018-10-19 11:30:54
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 26,187
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10638951
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DaScribbla/pseuds/DaScribbla
Summary: When her marriage proves radically different from what she hoped, Edith realizes that in order to survive, she will need an ally.Tags updated as the story continues.





	1. Visitation

**Author's Note:**

  * For [hatchet](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hatchet/gifts).



> *Patrick Warburton voice* If you are looking for a story where Edith and Thomas love each other very much and have a pleasant marital experience, then you would be better off reading some other fic. 
> 
> Ahem. Let me put it like this: the original film was Jane Eyre; this is The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Also, have fun with my blatant nod to Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides in this first chapter.
> 
> NOTE: This is categorized as femslash, but do note that there is a LOT of heterosexual action in the first few chapters. I promise you Edith/Lucille is endgame.

 

> “Don’t be a fool for the devil, darling, unless he treats you a damn sight better than the Almighty.”
> 
> Anne Rice, _The Vampire Lestat_

* * *

 

Marriage was chillier than Edith had expected. Long nights spent with too many novels had led her to anticipate breathless kisses in rainy gardens, languorous mornings spent tangled around each other in sleep, or at least the sort of heady closeness that only traveling by train can afford. 

Still, she supposed that she had been grateful for the solitude of traveling in her own compartment; it had given her time to sit and process her grief. And she supposed it had been pleasant to dine with her new husband and spend long talks with him in the back of the train in the open air.

But had it really been asking so much that she be permitted to sleep at his side? To be perfectly candid, she felt Thomas had been displaying an absurd prudishness towards the subject.

Upon her arrival at her new home, she’d been greeted by Lucille, just back from a trip to the village. She answered Lucille’s questions about their voyage perfunctorily but couldn’t push away her own misgivings regarding the house; there was an atmosphere she didn’t like. Even her new husband seemed on edge, new lines appearing in his face already as though they were years into the marriage instead of days.

Complicating matters further was her sister-in-law herself. She was absolutely courteous, and sometimes even warm, but always she gave off a sense of detachment that Edith found she couldn’t ignore, as though she were carefully constructing a blank face for the outside world. Even though she’d not even been in the house a full day (and what a house; despite the tour they’d given her, Edith felt it was too easy to get lost in that maze of rooms), she couldn’t help but feel as though Lucille were waiting for her to pack up her things and leave. She felt like an intruder upon their routines — and it was quite clear to her that Lucille found the adjustment just as difficult.

Edith rose from her bath and wrapped her robe — no, her _dressing gown,_ she had to learn to speak the language —around herself and tried to keep her teeth from chattering. It was difficult work. She wondered how long the hole in the roof had been there and how Thomas and his sister had managed to survive without contracting pneumonia. Well. She supposed she’d find out.

She hurried to the master bedroom to dress. On the ground floor below, Thomas was occupied with some banal task that he hadn’t bothered to describe in much detail. As she pulled her nightdress over her head, she couldn’t help but wonder if her husband were making a conscious effort to avoid her. 

But those feelings vanished later that night when they were at last together in the bedroom, and Thomas kissed her with the same feeling he had on that day back in Buffalo. Seeing her chance, she ran her hands down his chest and fumbled with the button of his waistcoat. He laid his hands over hers.

“All right,” he whispered. “But we must be _very_ quiet.”

It wasn’t quite what she’d intended — in what may perhaps have been undignified haste, she’d been hoping for consummation at its most basic sense, whereas Thomas seemed determined that they take their time and proceed to that final point by degrees. Still, his kisses were nothing to complain of, and his slender, clever fingers quickly proved that prudishness was not his problem at all. 

She stroked her hands down his back and grinned between the slow breaths she took to keep herself quiet. “Naughty,” she whispered in his ear. “You’ve done this before.” It was only a moment later that her body shuddered around his fingers. She hummed and rubbed her cheek against his throat, enjoying the gentle burn of the stubble that had appeared over the course of the day. 

She then made a move toward the buttons of his trousers, his length hard and visible through the cloth, but again, he covered her hands with his, pressing them gently back against the pillow on either side of her head. “It’s all right,” he murmured. 

“But you —”

“I won’t trouble you with it, Edith. It’s all right.”

“But I thought —”

“What did you think?”

She colored in the darkness and turned her face away. “Nothing. Good night.”

He kissed her forehead and squeezed her shoulder affectionately before rolling onto his side of the bed. The entire master bedroom smelled faintly of dust; the drapings had been beaten before their arrival — by Lucille undoubtedly, there were no servants to speak of — but the scent, unfortunately, seemed inescapable. Edith pressed closer to her new husband and breathed in his scent instead. Much better.

* * *

It was altogether a strange girl that they’d chosen this time around. This one wasn’t frightened of the creaks of the house, or the clanking elevator, or of the clay that seeped upwards as the house sank downwards. Instead, the newest jewel in their collection was frightened only of shadows, processed her grief far more quickly than expected, and had the damnable habit of appearing in the most unexpected places imaginable. Lucille had walked into the attic one day to find Edith reclined on the floor in a puddle of buttercup yellow skirts and old moth-eaten fur capes that she must have dragged out of a wardrobe somewhere. Pages of writing fanned out around her.

She looked up and hardly seemed startled by Lucille’s presence — which made Lucille herself bristle. How dare she become so in tune with this place in so little time, as though she had any right to it… 

When Lucille asked what she was doing in such an odd place, Edith replied, “Revising, of course. I think I’ve discovered my nook here.”

“How pleasant,” Lucille said, unable to think of anything else. Sunlight spilled from the nearby window, illuminating the gray dust motes in the air and turning Edith’s hair and gown a bright, polished gold. With a little stab of alarm, Lucille remembered the evening they’d met. The girl she’d been then was like a white shadow of what was before her now; she’d been slender and demure in her white frock, lit by candlelight only, a single pearl instead of a king’s ransom. As she’d danced with Thomas, Lucille had watched their reflections in the polished surface of the piano, and their figures had reminded her of a music box that Thomas had made long ago. But what she remembered best was Edith afterward, lifting her fingers to her lips because the melting wax from the candle had dripped downward and burned her.

With another, more grievous jolt, Lucille realized that their jewel was a particularly fine one indeed. As she made more inane conversation, she made note of the distance between Thomas’s currently unoccupied desk and Edith’s little nest. Hardly twenty feet. It was all too easy to imagine something happening. Anything. She perching on the desk, insinuating herself in a way she’d already proven was second nature, or he pinning her down among the furs. Off with the frock, shapely legs white against dark mink… 

 

The thought refused to leave her head. All through the day, she saw flashes of it in her mind’s eye, found herself overanalyzing the interactions between her brother and his wife for some sign that it had happened. She smiled a great deal at him, a secret, hinting one that made Lucille’s blood boil and her mind race, afire with the implications.

That night, she led him up to the attic and asked him. But he just laughed and tilted his head to nibble at her earlobe, hands already pawing at her skirts.

“I haven’t gone near that pretty cunt,” he said. “I assure you.”

She sat back on the furs that Edith hadn’t tidied up — the part of Lucille that craved order howled in frustration — and smiled. She liked how he’d put it. _Cunt_ implied that that was all he saw. Just a cunt. Just a cunt with money. 

And nothing more.

She lay back on the furs, pulling her nightdress up as far as she could stand it and motioned him to her.

“Do it like you would to her,” she said. 

He laughed down at her, kissing her right knee. “Do you _want_ me to sleep with her?” he teased. “You seem terribly preoccupied with the notion.”

“She’s a pretty one,” Lucille murmured as his fingers trailed over her thigh, up to her folds. “Can you blame me?”

“That seems rather ambiguous,” he murmured into her neck. She turned her head to breathe in the scent of his hair, grinning.

“Yes, well, I shan’t elaborate.” She reached down for his cock, liking his sigh. “Do it. Properly,” she said.

“It’s not a good idea…” But she could tell by his eyes that he burned for it just as much as she did.

“Just this once,” she whispered. 

When he fucked her, it was harder and quicker than she remembered it — but then, it had been at least a year since the last time. She wondered if he were granting her earlier request; Edith hardly seemed the sort who would enjoy it like this, but perhaps that was why. His thrusts, once he was deep in her, made little echoes of pleasure around her core. She imagined Edith where she was, rocking back and forth against Thomas, nightdress pulled high around her waist. But for a girl who left her things scattered about the house and made her desires so blatant, that would hardly do — she’d be bare, limbs wide and open, a leg over a shoulder here, an arm stretched out here, and all the while, that delicate skull tilted back, mouth open for more kisses, mewing for more in the way Lucille never did. 

She came hard, startled by its intensity, and sank back against the furs as Thomas swept her hair back from her forehead and finished his final, unsteady thrusts. 

He had hardly pulled away from her before a loud shriek echoed throughout the house. They both jumped, Thomas snapping back onto his knees. 

“What the devil— ?!”

She pushed her skirt back down and followed him out the attic door. Edith was screaming for him somewhere below, her voice unclear and reverberating around the walls of the house: _Thomas… Thomas… Thomas…_

Lucille paused at the top of the stairs and watched her brother disappear into the master bedroom. During the spaces between wives, while the money could still support them, he would sometimes coax her to the master bedroom to sleep after they made love. But she always preferred her own room, or the attic. There, she was never distracted by thoughts of their parents, or imagining their married life, their cold, joyless intercourse. But Thomas always felt comfortable there; she suspected that it made him feel safe. If he occupied the bedroom, _they_ could not.

The house carried sound well. Even from her place high above the bedroom and the landing, she could make out the sounds of Edith crying and her brother murmuring to her, but not any of what was being said. 

Ten minutes passed, and then Thomas was slipping back upstairs to her. 

“What was the matter?” she asked.

Thomas gave her a funny look. “Thought she saw a woman in the corner.”

“A woman?”

He hummed as they walked back up to the attic again. “Said she couldn’t make out her face, but that she was quite certain there was a woman there.” Lucille swallowed.

“Was she sleeping when you left?”

“Of course. It didn’t take her long.” 

* * *

Whatever fears of failing to fit into the routines at the hall that Edith had had were quickly dissipated as she realized that there were few expectations regarding how she spent her days. In the mornings, her husband would leave early to work on the machine that clanked and hissed outside their window every day while she breakfasted with Lucille. After that, her time was more or less her own. Generally, she spent most of it up in the attic revising, or writing new stories at the desk in front of the window by the library. Lucille would pass through sometimes with the tea tray to make sure she ate something.

And then, after dinner, they’d spend the rest of the evening in the parlor or the library, reading, or listening to Lucille play the piano, or making quiet conversation. And then, once they’d all retired, Thomas, in his turn, would find little ways to placate her, as though if he staved her off for long enough, she would decide that it was not worth kissing him goodnight. As far as she was concerned, he could follow that philosophy as much as he liked; she had no complaint against those hands of his. 

But her frustration with him was only growing. There had to be some way she could show him that his own desires were in no way offensive to her.

 

It was late afternoon and raining so much that little progress had been made with the machine outside. Thomas was forced to retreat indoors, clothes sopping and temper short. He’d gone upstairs to the workshop and not come down. 

Seated in her customary seat by the window in the library, Edith watched the rain slide down the window, casting bizarre shadows around the room. She wanted to write, but the weather outside proved too distracting: the rainwater made some of the clay seep upwards into the soil. Thomas’s boots, when he’d distractedly passed through to see her on his way up, were caked red. 

She sucked idly on the end of her pen. The words didn’t want to come today. 

If she was honest with herself, most of her problems stemmed from the figure she’d seen in her bedroom that night. Several times since then, she had woken in the middle of the night, sure that someone was looming over her bed, watching her. At least twice, it had proved to be Thomas, reclining beside her, who stroked her hair back, kissed her brow, and told her everything was all right, and that she should sleep. All of this called up the old memory-dreams from childhood. Everyone she’d told, including her father, had assumed she had just dreamed her mother’s apparition, but she knew better. Eventually, she’d learned not to mention it.

“Having difficulties?” It was Lucille, come to collect the empty teacup and saucer that sat at her elbow. She handed them to her and leaned back in her chair, rubbing at her temples. Another headache, the third in as many days. She wondered if she were developing a cold. 

“What’s the strangest thing in this house?” she asked, evading her sister-in-law’s question. She didn’t want to discuss her writing; as far as she was concerned, the less said about it, the better. 

Lucille looked amused. “What sort of a question is that?” she asked. “And why ever would you want to know?”

“Inspiration,” Edith said. When Lucille, tilting her head to one side, gave her a skeptical look, Edith sighed. “If you must know, I’m having terrible trouble with this piece I’m writing, and I need some distraction. So indulge me.”

Lucille half-smiled. “I’d venture that are a great many things in this house that you might consider strange,” she said.

“In this room, then,” Edith said, determined not to be disappointed. “Come now, it’s a rainy day, and I’m in need of entertainment.”

“In this room?” Lucille cocked an eyebrow and paused, as though thinking. “Would you excuse me a moment?” She strode off between the bookshelves. Edith half-rose out of her seat and craned her neck to see where she’d disappeared to but could only make the back of her: dark hair, blue bodice, and the thin strip of white skin at the base of her hairline.

Then she turned back and rejoined Edith at the window, several books under her arm. The rain was falling harder now, and Edith could hear the hiss of it on the floor in the great hall from where it fell through the hole in the roof. Pushing aside her anxious thoughts about mold, she craned her neck to see the title of the first book that Lucille had retrieved, but at the angle Lucille had tilted it, she couldn’t make it out. 

“Have you heard of a fore-edge illustration?” she asked. Edith shook her head, intrigued. “They’re images on the fore-edges of books, carefully designed to only appear when…” Carefully, Lucille bent the pages of the book into a curve to reveal an impressively well-executed illustration of a rose, a yellow-black butterfly alighting on its pink petals. Edith took the book from her and tried it for herself. It was strangely satisfying, making the image appear and disappear at her will. 

“It’s lovely.”

“All these books —” Lucille indicated the books she’d set down on the desk — “have such illustrations. Unfortunately,” she added as Edith picked up the next book, “some are not quite so innocent as the others…”

But Edith had already bent the next book’s pages. 

She raised her eyebrows. 

This illustration was of a Japanese couple _en flagrant_ — no, _not_ a couple, there was a third person behind them. She looked from the tangle of limbs to Lucille, whose lips were pressed together in a poorly-disguised smile. Edith was keenly aware of the heat rising to her face and neck. 

Then, as one woman, they burst into peals of laughter. 

“Are there more like this?” Edith asked between breaths, one hand pressed against her mouth in a half-hearted attempt to muffle her giggles. 

“At least a few.” Lucille was more composed, but her eyes danced in a way that Edith couldn’t help finding significantly more engaging than her usual marble countenance. “What, what interests could you possibly have there, Edith? You shock me!” She was really laughing now. It was startling the difference it made on her face. The shadows just fell away, like dead leaves from a tree.

“I don’t mean it like that!” Edith said.

“Ah, but then, I suppose this sort of thing could _hardly_ shock you, a woman of the world…”

Edith caught her eye and tried to decide if Lucille was teasing her or not. If she weren’t, Lucille clearly gave her and Thomas more credit for invention than they deserved. If she were, Lucille had a very strange bent of humor. 

Blushing at Lucille’s eyes on her, she stole another look at the illustration. It was just as lewd as the first time, but as she took in the twists of their limbs, the first inkling of an idea crept into her mind. Perhaps all her husband needed was an unequivocal sign that she had no reservations toward him…

She was torn from her thoughts by the rustling of fabric and the creaking of the frame of her chair: Lucille had risen from her own seat by the desk and leaned in behind her to look at the book over her shoulder. She could feel rather than see her shoulders shaking with silent laughter, just as she felt her warm breath ruffling her hair. It was an oddly comforting feeling. Edith tilted her head to the side in contemplation, self-consciously taking in the woman’s barely-hidden breasts as she twisted her head against her lover’s right thigh in a way that made Edith’s neck twinge in sympathy. Nothing like the encounters she had with Thomas upstairs in their bed, which were loving, she supposed, but performed beneath thick wool covers, in nightshirts and nightdresses. Thomas would undo the top button of her collar sometimes, to kiss her throat, but that was as reckless as they ever were. 

And never, never, the act that she’d been led to believe would have been performed weeks ago.

Perhaps all he needed was a demonstration, of sorts. Perhaps a small, simple change was all that was required to make things right. 

“What’s all the commotion?” 

To her horror, Thomas appeared amid the bookshelves, looking bemused by their mirth. Edith promptly let go of the book. It landed on the desk with a thunk. Lucille squeezed her shoulder and said something to Thomas, but Edith wasn’t listening. Her mind was someplace else. Making ready.

 

She excused herself early that night and took a bath to wash her hair and also quell her own tension. All evening, she’d had a strange sense of clairvoyance; every time she looked in the direction of her husband, she remembered her modest little plan and felt certain that it would work. As a result, her stomach had been tying itself in knots all evening. She’d hardly been able to eat dinner, let alone keep it down. 

She rose from the bath, sent the water gushing and gurgling through the pipes, and wrapped her dressing gown around herself to provide some meager protection against the cold before she hurried down the corridor to the master bedroom.

At her dressing table, she combed her hair almost feverishly until she was certain it was for once free of tangles. Then she dried it again on a spare flannel and breathed in and out a few times in an attempt to calm herself. She wanted everything to be perfect when he came. 

Uneasy about shutting herself alone into the cavernous master bedroom — thoughts of the woman she swore blind that she’d seen had made her paranoid — she’d taken a chance and left the door open. Now footsteps sounded in the corridor outside. Involuntarily, she tensed, freezing in the process of lowering her brush. She remembered the apparition — suppose it had come back? But that wasn’t possible. Thomas had told her there was no ghost, no figure. 

Suppose it was Thomas, and he’d come early?

But it was neither a ghost nor Thomas that passed by the doorway, but Lucille, candelabra in hand, the small flames giving her face an even more dramatic cast than usual. The two women stared at each other in surprise; Edith felt rather than saw her silver-blue gaze run over her body. She was suddenly aware of her own bareness beneath her dressing gown, and of how obvious it must have been to Lucille. Her face and neck were hot. 

With what seemed to be no small effort, Lucille tore her gaze away and nodded to her. “Good evening, Edith.”

“Good evening.” She nodded back to her, at a loss of what else to do. Her body thrummed and sang with a dark sort of energy, as though she were a string of a harp that had just been plucked. Her sister-in-law continued down the hall towards the staircase that led to her own bedroom, and Edith couldn’t help feeling somehow disappointed. Her heart hammered in her chest.

She pushed the thoughts away.

Once Lucille had disappeared up the stairs to her own bedroom (what did she do up there, and how did she bear it all alone, listening to the wind without any sort of companionship?) Edith scurried to the bed in her bare feet and sat down in the center. After a moment’s thought, she seized her manuscript and a pen. She wanted to appear natural when he came. 

Thoughts of Lucille kept creeping into her mind, unbidden. She hadn’t anticipated how much she liked having her sister-in-law’s eyes on her. As she scratched out a sentence, she thought about earlier in the day, with the illustrations that had proved so unexpectedly useful, and tried to gauge Lucille’s behavior. What had made her do it? Surely she could have left behind the vulgar illustrations and just let it be at flowers and butterflies. 

Since that afternoon, along with thoughts of the night ahead, Edith’s imagination had been strangely enamored with the feeling of Lucille’s breath in her hair as she’d leaned behind her. 

A soft knock on the door; Thomas entered, hair dripping. He was wrapped in his dressing gown, and Edith could tell that he was naked beneath it. As he put his things away, she replaced her pen and manuscript on her night table, keeping her eyes on him. He met her eyes with the joking smile that she liked.

“Edith?”

She motioned him over. Looking a touch amused, he obliged and sat at her side.

She kissed him and, before he could do anything, laid his hands over her breasts through the dressing gown. He pulled back from her and looked down at his hands, then back up at her. Slowly, almost shyly, she opened her dressing gown and pushed it off her shoulders.

It was the first time that he had seen her naked. He looked her up and down almost as though he were unsure of how to proceed, his hands hovering about an inch from her body. She took his hands, placed them on her breasts again, and kissed him once more. His palms were warm and just as soft as his lips. She thought she could sense a certain eagerness in him despite the controlled manner in which he returned her kisses — _why is he holding back?_ she wondered. _What is he wanting?_

She took a chance and moved her lips to his neck, nipping at the thin skin there. In his throat, he made a high noise that sounded to Edith’s ears like a whimper. Liking it, she did it again and then hummed as he began to stroke her nipples, lifting his chin to give her better access to his throat. As she kissed down the vein that pulsed there, dipping into the hollow of his neck, her questing fingers found the hem of his nightshirt and pulled upwards.

Obediently, he lifted his arms so she could pull it over his head, then took it from her and tossed it onto the floor beside the bed. He kissed her on the lips before she could look her fill of him, pushing her back across the length of the bed. His skin was still damp from his own bath, a wet lock of his hair brushing her forehead as he ran a hand down her side, over her hip and the curve of her thigh. Part of her wanted to close her eyes and give herself over to the relief of finally, _finally_ being here, but she couldn’t do that, she had to observe, she had to remember, she had to learn… She traced her hands over his back, fingers bumping over vertebrae, over his buttocks to the backs of his thighs. 

He was hard against her leg, but the thought of at last going through with it seemed suddenly overwhelming. Tentatively, afraid that somehow she would knock over the delicate house of cards they were building, she reached for his cock and, when he didn’t pull away but rolled forward into her hand with a little groan, marked it as a victory.

A little ache in her shoulder. He’d set his teeth there, was rocking along to her rhythm, eyes closed. She combed her other hand through his hair and breathed him in. He smelled clean and fresh from the bath, and with his eyes closed, his head buried in her shoulder, he looked almost heartrendingly innocent.

A strange, sad little thought drifted through her mind, and she couldn’t keep herself from saying it aloud.

“We’ll never be happier than we are right now.”

He opened his eyes and moved his mouth from her shoulder to her lips. “I defy that,” he whispered between kisses. Their tongues brushed together, and a little trickle of anxiety dripped into Edith’s stomach. 

_Now. Now before you lose your nerve._

Still kissing him, she guided him closer until she could feel him pressing against her opening. 

He abruptly pulled away from the kiss and caught her wrist in his hand. Startled, she stared up at him, unsure of what she had done wrong. Was _he_ supposed to make that decision?

“What is it?” she asked.

He cleared his throat. “Edith, really.”

Her heart sank. “What?”

“Well —” he laughed once, a coughing, mirthless sound — “ _really.”_

Disappointed and trying her hardest not to show it, she made a movement to roll over and cover herself again, but he stopped her. “No, no, wait.” He kissed her once more, reached down, and sure enough, she felt his fingers brush against her folds a moment later. “Here…”

“No —” she laid her hands on his chest and pushed him away gently.“I want _you._ ”

“For God’s sake, Edith.”

“Is that such a great request?”

He didn’t respond, just moved forward to kiss her again. The tip of his index finger pushed against her opening. Her face flushed. She felt less like a wife and more like a child who had to be coddled. She was no child!

With a growl of frustration, she pushed him away entirely to climb beneath the covers, not bothering to find her nightdress.

“Edith —” Thomas protested, still sitting there naked, his eyes dismayed as though he hadn’t had a part to play in her anger.

“Leave it,” she snapped.

“But —”

“Just leave it be!”

After a long moment, Thomas blew out the candles. There was a rustling sound as he found his nightshirt, and then he climbed in beside her. There was a terrible silence as they both stared up the ceiling in the darkness. Edith shivered in the cold, but she’d be damned if she left the bed in search of her dressing gown now. That would mean she’d admitted defeat.

“I don’t understand what you want,” she said at last.

“Edith, I’m trying to accommodate you.”

“Is it me?” She rolled over to look at him. But he was just a black shape on the pillow beside hers. “Is it something about me?”

There was a long pause.

“If you weren’t so damned fixated on it, perhaps I’d be more inclined,” Thomas said at last.

Edith stared at him, stunned, but finally rolled over when it was clear that he would not take back what he’d said.

 

From what she’d seen in the last few months, Edith suspected that her husband was uncomfortable taking the lead; at any rate, he’d seemed to much prefer it when she’d been the one to guide him. But he seemed determined to keep an ultimatum — either he governed, or no one did. That was the thought that carried her into sleep. Sleep itself brought strange, unsettling dreams: dark shadows slinking across walls, some bent and crooked shape scurrying into the wardrobe, a scratching sound in her ears like a cat pawing at the jam of the door.

 

A stabbing pain woke her at last, and as her eyes flew open, she automatically pressed her hand into her stomach. The pressure made it worse, the stabbing became an ache deep within her guts, much like the pains that came at her monthly bleedings. Breathing hard, she slid a hand down to her skirt to feel for tell-tale blood stains, but there was nothing. 

“Thomas…” She had to work to speak. Her voice was mostly a whimper. “Thomas?” She looked to her right and realized with a sudden chill that had nothing to do with the cold that he was not in her bed. Gritting her teeth, she pushed herself onto her knees to look around the darkened bedroom, still clutching her stomach. “Thomas, where are you?” 

She continued to call for a minute more but was eventually forced to conclude that he was not in the room at all. Blinking back tears of pain, she curled into a ball beneath the blankets and tried to sleep through her own agony.

 

When she awoke again, daylight streamed through the window at the far end of the room, and Thomas was seated in the armchair, forehead wrinkled in concern. Feeling drained, she reached out with one weak hand to touch his knee. He started to attention.

“Edith!”

“What is it?” she asked blearily. “Why are you there?”

“Don’t try to get up,” he said, half-standing to push her gently back against the pillows. “You were sleepwalking last night.”

Edith frowned. “I was?” He nodded.

“You got as far as the corridor outside before I could catch up to you. Do you —” But he stopped as Edith cried out and seized her stomach. A fresh pain had stabbed into her guts. “Edith…” He allowed her to grip his hand as tightly as she needed until the pains were gone. “You did this last night, too,” he said.

“Where were you?” she asked weakly.

He frowned. “Where was I?”

“I woke up once and you were gone. Where did you go?” 

The corner of his mouth curved up slowly, as though she’d told a joke he was only just beginning to understand. “I was here all night, Edith.” 

“No, you weren’t,” Edith insisted. “I called for you, and you weren’t there!”

“Edith!” There was real admonishment in his voice. “I was right beside you the entire night. You must have been dreaming.”

“I wasn’t dreaming!”

“And anyway,” he continued smoothly as though he’d not heard her, “you really can’t expect people to always be where you need them just because it’s convenient for you.”

“Thomas —” she groaned, squeezing her eyes shut — “that’s not what I meant. If you’d just tell me the truth —”

“I _have_ told you the truth,” he insisted. “I was there all night.” He stroked her hair back from her face. “It was just a dream,” he said reassuringly. “Just a dream. Now, I don’t want to hear any more of this, all right? Do you promise?”

She hesitated and then nodded. Perhaps she’d been mistaken after all. It was possible that her sudden illness had made her imagine things… 

“Good.” He bent down to kiss her forehead. “Now, I have to go out and work, but I’ll be sure to send Lucille up to sit with you —”

She caught his hand. “Can’t _you_ stay?”

He laughed, bemused. It felt like a slap in the face. “Remember what I just said, Edith? We’re not dolls for you to push about!” 

_“That’s not what I’m saying!”_ she exclaimed, then covered her mouth when her voice echoed off the walls. “I’m sorry,” she said in a more level tone, squeezing her eyes shut. _Temper, temper…_ “But is it really too much to ask that my husband stay here with me?”

“I _have_ stayed.” He gave her hand a quick squeeze. “But now I have to work.” 

“Wait!” She scrambled to sit up as he headed for the door. “Thomas, don’t —”

But the door thudded shut behind him. 

It was a long, cold pause before Edith began to cry. She wasn’t entirely sure what she’d done to make him snap at her like that, but she must have deserved it. She wished she could do their scene over again like a play on stage and get the dialogue right this time so he’d stay a few minutes longer, or at least would leave with some warmer word. _He doesn’t love me,_ she thought miserably. _Of course he doesn’t. He’ll send me back home the first chance he gets._ To her chagrin, she thought she might even welcome it. She was homesick for Buffalo and the noise of its streets. But Buffalo wouldn’t be home if it didn’t have her father there to welcome her back and let her cry about all that had happened. And his presence was now an impossibility. 

She was still sobbing when a knock came on the door and Lucille entered with a tray laden with the tea service and a few slices of toast. 

“Thomas told me you were ill, I —” She broke off, seeing Edith curled around herself in the bed, weeping like a child. The tray clattered onto the nightstand, and then she was beside her on the bed, a hand on her shoulder. “Edith, what’s wrong?”

“Was I wrong in marrying him?” The question flew out of her before she could stop it, and there was no calling it back now. She watched Lucille’s face change from shock to a strange sort of blankness. 

“Of course not,” she said. “He loves you.”

“I don’t think so. I’ve done something wrong, somehow. I shouldn’t have come here.” She was beginning to cry again. On instinct, she curled into Lucille, who froze against her for a moment and then cautiously wrapped her arms around her. 

“I brought you some breakfast,” she said as Edith continued to sob. “You need to keep up your strength.”

“I couldn’t eat a thing,” Edith said thickly. “I feel so…” She didn’t finish the sentence. 

“Where does it hurt?” asked Lucille. She had a cool, businesslike voice that made it easy to take comfort in her. 

“Here.” She put her hand on her belly. Lucille hummed and didn’t say anything more, just rocking her back and forth gently. Gradually, she ceased crying and just lay there limply in her arms, breathing in her scent. 

“Would you like me to brush your hair?” Lucille said at last. “I find the sensation can be soothing, sometimes.”

Edith nodded, her eyes closed, and Lucille left her to find her hairbrush on the dressing table.

“I had the strangest dreams last night,” Edith said. Lucille settled behind her and pulled her hair back. 

“What sort of dreams?”

Edith shook her head. “I don’t want to discuss it.” She paused. “But I can’t put them out of mind. It feels as though they’re following me about. I get sick when I think about them.” Carefully, Lucille ran the brush through her curls. Edith closed her eyes, enjoying the gentle tug against her scalp. “There’s something more.”

Edith bit her lip and hesitated, unsure if it would appropriate for her to continue. Then she decided that if Lucille was to be her only female companionship, she would have to learn to confide in her sometime. “Do you think,” she began, “that it’s wicked of us to want certain things?”

“Everyone wants something, Edith.”

“I mean, things that people say you shouldn’t.” She turned back to face the wall. The bristles of the brush scratched her scalp, and the weight of Lucille’s hand on her shoulder made her acutely aware of her presence behind her. Her warmth. “Something that they admonish you for when you ask for it?”

“I’ve wanted many things in my life,” Lucille said. “Few of them have been considered particularly good or wholesome.”

“Did you ever receive any of them?”

“ — not without paying heartily for them first.”

Edith sighed. “I wouldn’t know where to begin with this. And it seems as though I’ve done nothing but pay since I made this decision.’

Lucille paused in brushing her hair. “Is this,” she asked at last, “something to do with my brother?”

Edith swallowed and nodded, then turned to face her again. “It’s only…” She tried to choose her words with care. “As a wife — as _his_ wife — don’t I have a right to expect — or at least desire — certain… things?”

Lucille laid down the brush on the bedclothes. Outside, the men’s voices rose and fell. “Tell me,” was all that she said.

Edith’s cheeks flamed. “He — er — he kisses me. And he’ll use his hands.” It was suddenly difficult to meet her eyes. “But if I try to… advance things… He stops, and he becomes cruel. He says things,” she finished shortly. “Things that hurt me.”

Lucille was studying her again, her expression strangely blank, as though by design. “Would you like me to speak to him?” she asked.

“No!” Edith said immediately. “That would be —” _humiliating,_ she thought. _I don’t need an emissary to speak to my own husband._ “Unnecessary.”

“He might listen to me,” Lucille said. “May I try?” When Edith didn’t reply immediately, she added, “I know that sometimes my demeanor may seem cold. But I assure you that I don’t want to see you suffer. Things are hard enough.”

After a moment’s more thought, Edith swallowed her pride and nodded. “I think it’s something about me,” she said softly. She looked down at her hands, twisted her fingers back in forth in her lap. “I don’t think that he likes me very much.”

“No.” A hand tilted her chin upwards. Startled, she met Lucille’s blue gaze. “You’re a lovely girl. Unbearably so, if you want the truth. It’s not you.”

“I’m not lovely,” Edith replied. “Not where it counts.”

Lucille half-smiled. “Nor am I.”

A little shyly, Edith returned her smile. 

Something twisted sharply in her gut, and she doubled over in pain. Her eyes watered. Murmuring something, Lucille pulled her close to her, back against her chest, and laid her hands over Edith’s. 

“Shhhhh…”

After a moment, the pains subsided, and she sagged against Lucille, who reached over with one hand to the nightstand for her tea. 

“Here. Drink this.” Edith didn’t particularly want it, but she allowed Lucille to tilt the cup against her lips and took a few sips. It was almost sickeningly sweet. “Good girl,” Lucille murmured, stroking her shoulder. “Good girl.” She laid her back against the pillows and smoothed her hair back from her face. “Is it near your time?” 

Edith shook her head. “I don’t understand…” she murmured.

Lucille looked more tentative when she spoke again. “And you don’t think you might not be, well —” Her expression was strange, uncomfortable and wary. “Is it possible?”

“No,” Edith said flatly and turned her face away. “ _That’s_ impossible.” It was also impossible for her to keep the bitterness out of her voice. 

“Well. You’d better rest for today, no matter what,” Lucille said. “Just lie quietly.” She rose to go, but Edith, for reasons she couldn’t quite fathom, reached out and seized her wrist.

“Stay with me?”

Lucille looked somewhat taken aback. But she nodded and sat back down beside her, curling an arm around her and humming the lullaby she’d played that first morning. The warmth at her side was comforting, and the pressure of Lucille’s body against her own was stirring in ways she hadn’t anticipated. As if she could sense Edith’s feelings, Lucille was absolutely still, statue-like where she half-sat half-lay in Thomas’s place, holding her hand and stroking her hair until she slept.

* * *

Something had to be done. That much was clear. Seated by her sister-in-law, one hand still brushing back her hair, she listened to the tide of her breathing and wondered.

It was another thing that made this one strange: her ability to leech out Lucille’s sympathies. Oh, she’d felt sorry for all of them, in her way, and ached for them when they died — but always her sympathy was tinged with a fair amount of contempt. It made it all easier. 

But it was difficult to find Edith contemptable. She was prettier, she was smarter, she was far more _alive_ than the others. And she was doing her damndest to make a home of Allerdale, which demonstrated a tenacity that Lucille could admire. 

But it was those qualities, she reminded herself sternly, that made her all the more dangerous. 

This news of Thomas’s behavior, however… That was even more concerning. According to him, their bed had been cold as ice. Now she learned that that had not been strictly true. Oh, he was so like a child in his thinking, sometimes: as long as I use only my hands, it’ll be all right; as long as I don’t do it _properly_ … 

Moreover, it wasn’t like him to be cruel for the sake of being cruel. Lucille bent a little closer to Edith and, more or less on instinct, with an eye on her face to make sure she didn’t wake, she carefully pulled back the cuff of Edith’s right sleeve. Her wrist was clean. No discoloration, no bruises. So was the other. So were her forearms. 

Small mercies, then. 

Lucille didn’t trust men. Hadn’t for most of her life. Cruel, bullying stable boys, leering friends of her father, patronizing doctors, and violent attendants had sapped her of all her good will towards the other sex. With one exception. 

Because Thomas would never do this. Thomas knew what all that had been done to her, Thomas understood, Thomas would never _become like them_. 

Was it _because_ he wanted her? Lucille couldn’t quite blame him; Edith was an American strain of English rose, and sometimes Lucille would catch herself wondering what it must be like to bed down at her side every night and have to hold back, back, back…

And since he couldn’t possibly blame or hurt Lucille, he’d deflected his frustration onto the source. 

She sighed. _Let him,_ she told herself. _Let him do what he wishes._ But that meant risk. Who would love Lucille if Edith was there to love instead? 

That was the other thing. That he had lied to her. The hardest, most stinging part of it all.

Edith shifted beneath the coverlets, a frown pulling at her lips and a sound of discomfort rising out of her, but she remained asleep. Lucille took her hand and stroked her hair back from her face. _Our little torturer,_ she thought and pressed closer to her to stroke her back, Edith’s head supported against her shoulder. 

Quietly, so she wouldn’t disturb her rest, she began to hum a lullaby. In sleep, Edith nestled closer to her.

Something had to be done.

* * *

Edith woke alone several hours later, groggy and bewildered, but feeling better than before. She’d had a dream, she thought, about sailing over an ocean in a rowboat, the waves rocking her back and forth while the wind hummed a melody that seemed somehow familiar.

She had enough strength to rise and put on her dressing gown, after which she ventured downstairs. She’d left her manuscript in the library the other day.

But when she arrived there, it was just in time to catch part of a murmured conversation there between the shelves.

Thomas, sounding put out: _Lucille, it’s none of your business._

Lucille, collected as usual: _You weren’t there. You didn’t hear her. Do you what you must, but don’t be cruel for the sake of being cruel. It’s not her fault._

A sigh: _Lucy…_

Lucille: _Stop it. Hush. She’s distressed. She’s convinced you want her to go back to America. You have to be kinder. You_ must _be._

There was a murmured reply that Edith couldn’t catch. She stole closer, feeling like a criminal walking deliberately towards danger just for the rush of adrenaline it afforded her.

They were at the large desk by the window: Lucille seated on it and Thomas standing in front of her, holding her hands. Their heads were bent close together, and, for a wild moment, Edith thought they were kissing. 

“Whatever you need to do, do it,” Lucille was saying. She put a hand on his chest. “Just don’t hurt her.”

“It’s unlike you to be sympathetic,” Thomas said. His voice was low and teasing, and as she pressed her back against the nearest bookshelf, for some reason frightened of being caught, Edith felt a small twinge of sorrow. She couldn’t remember the last time her husband had spoken to her like that, if ever he had. And, beyond sorrow, a spark of something else, some dark, ugly, oily feeling in her chest. Suspicion. No… paranoia, surely… 

Jealousy? Or envy? 

“So what if I am?” Lucille was saying. “Cruelty is not the object here, and you should know that.”

Thomas chuckled softly. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say you were mashed out on her.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. But do you promise?”

“Yes. Of course I promise.”

Their voices died down again. Feeling ugly and uncertain, although she couldn’t quite say why, Edith crept back upstairs to the warmth of her bed. Her manuscript could wait for another day.


	2. Vision

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nightmares can't hurt you.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Have fun with my blatant nod to the film Stoker in this chapter. Chapter-specific warnings for a lot of mindfuckery and some physical violence near the end. Also, there's not as much Lucille POV as I would have liked, but I will make up for that in the next chapter.

_“_ Ah — _ah_ —”

Her chest rose and fell heavily, with her nightdress pushed up to her waist and her husband’s head buried between her legs. Her back and the space between her breasts was damp with sweat, and his thumbs pressed into the backs of her knees where he held them over his shoulders. The bridge of his nose rubbed against her bud, hard enough that her foot jerked involuntarily into his lower back.

“Ow!”

“Sorry!” 

Thomas pulled his head away for a moment to laugh into the line of her thigh. 

It was late in the evening. They’d retired for the night over half an hour ago, and when Edith had returned from her bath, she’d found Thomas seated on the bed in his nightshirt, hair still wet. He’d beckoned her into his arms and, murmuring an apology for his behavior of late, had laid her across the bed and nosed his way down to his present place between her thighs. 

Edith was laughing too, but her grin went slack as Thomas nipped her there, in the line between her thigh and pelvis, and then, his eyes still full of laughter, bent his head back down again. He was sucking on her now, fingers stroking her walls. Another jolt ran through her body, making her toes curl. She seized him by his hair and forced him even closer against her, not caring whether he could breathe or not, but he didn’t seem to care either; he took further hold of her left thigh with his free hand, eyes closed, as though he wanted to smother himself in her. The thought was enough. She came hard with a jolt of her hips and a cry that she couldn’t muffle. Distantly, through the haze of satisfaction that swept through her body, she wondered if she’d been loud enough that Lucille might have heard.

Thomas crawled out from beneath the blankets, wiping at his face with the back of his hand, and collapsed bonelessly beside her. He was panting as hard as she was. She rolled onto her side to face him, smiled as he played with a lock of her hair. 

“You really _have_ done this before,” she said weakly. He grinned and kissed her. She could taste herself on his lips. She pushed him back just enough to see his eyes and let her hand linger on his chest. “Will you tell me with whom?” Her tone was light, joking, but he seemed to lose all his humor then. He reached down for her hand and kissed her fingers distractedly. His eyes were somewhere else. “Thomas?”

“You don’t have to know,” he said softly. 

“Why _can’t_ you tell me?” she pressed. “I wouldn’t be angry. I’m the one who has you now. It’s not…” She trailed off as he let go of her hand and turned onto his back entirely. 

“Do we have to discuss this?” he said.

She bit her lip. “All right.” A flare of relief swept through her when he obliged to wrap his arms around her and press his knees into the backs of hers. She could feel his length hard and insistent against her leg, but when she made a move towards him with her hand, he caught it and laid it back over her stomach. She swallowed the urge to growl in frustration. No matter what she did, she seemed to stray into forbidden territory. “You know,” she continued, “it’s really not an intrusion…”

“Edith.” His tone told her that there was no room for discussion. Then he kissed the back of her neck, clearly to trying to alleviate some of the sting of his words. “I’m sorry about the way I’ve been,” he murmured. “But I hope that next time, you’ll feel able to speak directly to me. My sister doesn’t have any part in this, all right?”

She nodded and closed her eyes, weary of talking. 

 

She drifted in and out of sleep for several hours, and when she woke again, she found herself alone. 

She sat up. “Thomas?”

But he didn’t seem to be anywhere nearby. Again. Assuming that he hadn’t been the first time and that her memory hadn’t just been playing tricks on her.

She remembered what she had glimpsed in the library earlier that day and thought of his reticence when she’d asked about his past. 

_Stop it,_ she told herself. _You don’t want to make yourself think this._ How did she even know that it _had_ happened? She’d misremembered Thomas’s absence from her bed the previous night — that is, assuming that Thomas could be believed. 

But why would he lie? 

Unless it was to hide his own indiscretions.

No. It was impossible. It had been Lucille, after all, who’d taken the time to speak up for her. And she was so strangely kind to her, not the way a jealous, well… a jealous _lover_ would be. Another thought occurred to her: since Lucille had championed her, it was because of her that Thomas had treated her with more attention that evening. That apology was only because she had asked him to do it. Had it not been for her, their bed would have been as cold as ever. 

New warmth curled in her belly, twisting and sly.

Her imagination, impulsive and unruly as ever, suddenly conjured Lucille curled beside her in Thomas’s place. Eyes glittering in the gloom. 

More warmth. Edith shifted beneath the blankets and breathed out carefully. 

She imagined Lucille above her, undoing the pearl buttons of her nightdress to kiss her throat and cup her breasts, stroking her nipples as she dragged herself further down her body to where Thomas had been just hours before. Her tongue against her folds, desperate for her.

Her belly was liquid fire.

Edith was suddenly too desperate to feel ashamed. She slid a hand under the blankets, under her skirt, and rubbed at her bud. She was still slick from earlier in the night; if she tried hard, she could almost pretend her hand was a tongue — frightening, in a way, how quickly desire could take hold — 

Creaking above her made her freeze, and for a moment, she could have sworn she could hear the faint strains of a woman singing. It could only have been Lucille. What her song accompanied, Edith tried not to imagine. _You don’t want to make yourself think this._

Oh, this was mad. Why should she want _this_ , any more than she should suspect the other thing? Logic told her to just go to sleep. Her body was not so self-controlled and howled for more, a deep, dark pulse within her.

In the end, what did it matter, as long as she was alone?

She lay back against her pillows again and moved her fingers again, eyes squeezed shut. Lucille teasing her tongue inside her. Lucille’s mouth on hers.

When she came, she didn’t murmur a name aloud, but whispered it in her mind and wondered if, somehow, _she_ was aware of it.

 

In her dreams, Lucille was kissing her, and Edith could taste herself on her tongue, bitter and salty-sweet all at once.

 

To her dismay, Thomas seemed just as preoccupied the next morning as he’d been for the last month. For a moment that frightened as much as it mortified, Edith wondered if he’d somehow managed to guess what she had done and thought during his absence. But that mortification was nothing compared to what she felt sitting there in the same room as Lucille. What had possessed her last night? She felt the same sort of shame that she had when she’d tried to help Thomas along — and this was far beyond the bounds of marriage, to say nothing of Christian law. She remembered Thomas’s words from the other day: _if I didn’t know better, I’d say you were mashed out on her._ Was she? This wasn’t what she’d bargained for when she’d accepted his proposal. In fact, none of this was what she’d bargained for. She’d expected to be treated not like a princess, but at least like someone who had feelings. 

Across the table, Lucille was studying her over the rim of her teacup. Edith’s face and neck burned.

“What is it?” Edith asked her, not wanting to meet her eyes.

“I was thinking of a line of poetry that I love,” Lucille said. She closed her eyes. “ _I see a lily on thy brow, / With anguish moist and fever-dew, / And on thy cheeks a fading rose / fast withereth too.”_

Edith couldn’t help but smile crookedly. “Keats?”

“You know it?”

“I loved that poem when I was younger. Though I always preferred Shakespeare.”

“ _She hangs like a jewel in an Ethiop’s ear,”_ Lucille said dreamily.

“I wouldn’t have taken you for a lover of poetry,” Edith said. 

Lucille didn’t directly reply. “After our parents died, we started replenishing the library. Thomas bought the Keats.”

“My mother and I would read Shakespeare together in the evenings, while she was still alive,” Edith said. 

“Which was your favorite?”

“ _Macbeth_ ,” she said. 

Lucille bit her lip, and a rare smile crossed her face. “ _Where our desire is got without content; /’Tis safer to be that which we destroy / Than by destruction dwell in doubtful joy.”_

Edith thought for a moment. It had been a long time since she’d read Keats. “ _In pity give me all, / withhold no atom’s atom or I die / or living on perhaps, your wretched thrall, / Forget —_ ” she shook her head. “That’s just it. I don’t remember the rest.”

“ _Forget, in the mist of idle misery, / Life’s purposes, — the palate of my mind / Losing its gust, and my ambition blind,”_ Lucille finished.

“That’s right.”

“Do you read Baudelaire?” asked Lucille. When Edith shook her head, she said, “Baudelaire and Rimbaud have seen me through a great deal. You’ll have to let me read it to you some time.”

“I never learned French.”

“You don’t need to. You can hear the music in it regardless of whether you understand it. They’re not for the faint of heart, but I think there’s a sort of beauty in the grotesque, don’t you?”

Edith didn’t reply, suddenly taken aback by the intensity of Lucille’s gaze. It seemed to burn through her flesh, into her mind and her soul itself, scorching and hungry. 

She remembered the night before, the things she’d allowed herself to imagine and the things she had done, and leaped to her feet. Her chair screeched across the floor. Lucille was immediately on her feet as well.

“What is it?”

“I’m just — I feel ill,” Edith said. “I think I want to go back to bed.”

 

It had been her intention to have some time free of her convoluted feelings, but Lucille ended up seated in the armchair by the bed in the master bedroom, reading Baudelaire aloud to her in a confident stream of French, pausing after each poem to translate. She’d been right; the verses were grotesque, vulgar even, but beautiful, and there _was_ music in it, albeit not in the poetry itself. Edith closed her eyes and let the sound of Lucille’s voice, lower and throatier than she was accustomed to hearing it, carry her to sleep, murmuring to her about silken curls of hair and ports in distant lands.

 

Thomas helped her downstairs to dinner that night, murmuring little words of encouragement whenever the pains struck her. As if to placate her in some way, Lucille had lit the crystal candelabras that Edith had run across in the attic earlier in the month; they glittered like the ground after a frost. Lucille pulled her chair out for her, and Thomas helped her into it. Frustration flared up within her, and with it, anger — was she truly so helpless that she couldn’t be trusted to even walk on her own? As much as she savored the new attention from Thomas, she wished she could have a moment’s peace. Her dinner sat heavy within her stomach, her tea too sweet and cooling rapidly in the frigid air.

Her fingers brushed against Lucille’s as she handed her her plate, and Lucille jerked back. “Thomas,” she said. “She’s frozen.” Thomas took a final sip of his tea, replaced the cup in his saucer, and left his end of the table to kneel beside her chair and take her hands in his, chafing her fingers between his palms, still warm from the teacup. Edith didn’t look at him; instead, she watched Lucille gather up the rest of the china, placing Thomas’s empty cup and saucer on the tower of plates that she carried deftly in one hand. There was something about it, something that she couldn’t quite place… A strangeness. He’d drank it so easily, with no recoil… 

Lucille caught her eye. “Edith?”

“I —” She started up from her chair, forgetting momentarily about Thomas’s presence, and nearly careened against him. He stood and tried to make her sit down again, but she gently pushed him away. “Let me help you with those.”

“No need,” Lucille said easily and continued to gather up the dishes.

“No, really, I should help —” 

She reached out to take a few of the cups from Lucille, but something happened — either her grip was looser than she’d thought, or her perception of depth hadn’t been quite right — and suddenly the teacup slipped from her fingers.

China smashed across the floor. 

A chilly silence. Face turning hot and red, Edith looked from the shards of the cup to Thomas, who had looked away from her as if in disappointment, or embarrassment. There was another, quieter rattle of china as Lucille set down her load and knelt down to pick up the larger pieces from the floor. Edith’s nose burned, her eyes pricking hard. 

She wasn’t meant to be here. She should never have married him, should never have let him turn her head like this. What sort of game had she thought she was playing? She was no baroness — she was graceless and awkward and fixated on all the wrong things. Hysterical. 

She turned and fled the dining room. Her footsteps echoed off the walls as she climbed the staircase, for the moment ignoring how quickly her breath left her. Behind her, she heard Thomas call her name. 

The first door she saw was the one that led to the bath. She hurried in and shut the door behind herself, leaning against it to breathe hard. She was badly winded just from a flight of stairs. This place was taking its toll on her. 

There was a knock on the door just behind her ear. She jumped. 

“Edith?”

“I — I’m just going to take a bath,” she called. “I’ll be out in a little while.” There was a quiet sound behind her, a _plink_ like a drop of water landing in a puddle.

“I’m not angry, Edith, if that’s what you think. I swear —”

“I know,” she said. “I just need to be alone for a little while.”

_Plink._

“All right,” he said. “Really, Edith, it’s just a teacup.”

“Of course, I understand that. Will you please just leave me be?” 

There was silence, broken only by the eventual sound of retreating footsteps and yet another _plink._ Frowning, Edith looked over her shoulder for the source.

This one was by far the worst. 

Edith remembered nothing of what her mother’s ghost had looked like. And the woman she’d seen in the bedroom before had been little more than a scarlet shadow, albeit a shadow that carried with it the bitter scent of blood on the air. 

But this one was viscerally real. 

It looked as though it had rotted for a long time, yet not long enough for its body to dry. It floated there in the full bathtub, its red, misshapen hands hanging off the edges. The _plink-plinking_ sound was that of the tiny drops of blood that dropped into the water from where they dribbled down its face from the large cleaver that was buried in its knotted red forehead. 

Its eyes opened. Jet black: no whites or iris or pupil.

“ _Edith…”_

She flew for the door knob, but it had suddenly jammed. She cursed and slapped at it, then risked another glance over her shoulder. The thing was rising from the bath, stretching out one scarlet talon for her. She slammed against the door with her fist. 

“ _Someone please, let me out — let me out —!”_

_“Edith,”_ the thing rasped, its voice bizarrely androgynous, impossible to pin down. _“Edith, the poison — the tea — the tea —”_

The door knob gave way at last, and Edith all but fell out of the bathroom into Thomas’s arms. She sobbed against his chest, her fingers hard against his upper arms where she clung to him. 

“What’s happened?” Lucille appeared down the hall. 

“A woman!” Edith babbled. “There’s a woman in the bathroom, she — she —” But she’d looked back over her shoulder and now saw that it was entirely deserted. The bathtub itself was empty and bone dry. “She was there…” she whispered. Tears stabbed at her eyes.

“What did she look like this time?” Thomas asked gently. 

She turned to him indignantly. “You don’t believe me?” 

“Darling, there’s nothing there…”

“She was red, like the other one. And she had this — this knife —” she gestured with her hand — “in her head. Her forehead.”

“Her forehead,” Lucille repeated. 

Thomas looked from his wife to his sister. “It must have been a nightmare,” he said.

“But I wasn’t asleep, Thomas!”

“A nightmare. Or — you’re ill, Edith, is it possible you could have imagined it?”

“I didn’t imagine this!” she insisted. “I didn’t dream this up, I swear! I could smell her blood in the air!” 

Lucille suddenly turned away from them, covering her mouth with one hand.

“Lucy?” Thomas asked warily. 

“No, it’s fine,” she said. She sounded as though she were about to choke. 

But Thomas wrapped his arm around Edith’s shoulders and escorted her across the corridor to their bedroom, closing the door without latching it. 

“You can’t say things like this in front of her,” he said quietly, putting his hands on her shoulders.

“Thomas, I wasn’t imagining it, I swear to you —”

“No doubt it seemed very real to you at the time,” Thomas conceded, “but really, Edith. A woman in a bath with a knife in her head? It’s like something out of a penny dreadful!”

“Don’t condescend to me!”

“It’s my sister I’m thinking of, Edith,” he said. “She’s far more sensitive than she lets on and, well, this sort of thing may be all right for you, but she’s a little more delicate. Do you understand?” Edith opened her mouth to reply but could think of nothing to say. “From now on,” Thomas continued, “if you think you see something like this, just… just keep it to yourself, all right?” 

She stared at him in shock. “Thomas!”

“ _Please_ , Edith!” he said. “I’m begging you.”

“You have no comprehension of the things I see,” she said. “If you did, you wouldn’t tell me to do this.”

“Or is it you who has no comprehension?” he replied. “Come now, Edith. I don’t deny they must be frightening, but in the end, they’re not real. They’re nightmares. That’s all. _Nightmares_ can’t hurt you. Now, please.” He took her hand and pressed his lips to her knuckles. “Will you promise me?”

Fighting a sob, Edith nodded. He kissed her forehead, squeezed her shoulder, and then left the room. She heard him murmuring to Lucille out on the stairwell and wondered what it must be like to know either of them that completely. 

In the end, she found her nightdress and readied for bed, hoping that sleep would take away her fear, or at least dull the sting of what he’d demanded of her. 

 

But sleep proved to be elusive — first, there came Thomas, who wanted to make things up to her, but not in the way she really desired; and then, after he’d fallen asleep, one arm wrapped around her like a child clutching a toy, there came the _plink plink plink plink_ from across the corridor, echoing and distant as a memory half-forgotten.

 

She rose early the next morning and, pausing only to wrap her dressing gown around herself, hurried downstairs to the lower level. She felt safer there. In doing so, she was forced to pass by the large mirror hanging in the hall. The hollow-eyed woman staring back at her didn’t feel like a reflection. More like yet another specter who’d decided to haunt the house.

She hadn’t forgotten what the ghost had said, and as frightened as she was, she had to be rational, and so, therefore, she wanted to inspect the kitchen for herself. 

But when she pushed aside the green baize door and then opened the door to the kitchen, she realized for all that she’d woken early, she’d not taken into account the vampiric hours of her sister-in-law. Lucille sat in front of the fireplace, still clothed in her frock from the last night. Several curls hung astray from her coiffure. On the counter near the stove was piled the shards of the teacup that Edith had broken. The fireplace was mostly dying embers.

Suddenly uncomfortable, Edith made a move to close the door, but Lucille spoke without turning around.

“You don’t have to leave.”

She froze. “I didn’t think you wanted to be disturbed.”

“I’ve sat here long enough.” Lucille twisted around to look at her. Her face was pale. “Are you all right? You seemed distressed. Last night.”

Edith remembered what Thomas had asked of her. “I’m fine,” she said, against her better judgment. “And you?”

Lucille half-smiled and didn’t precisely reply. “You look tired.”

“I haven’t slept well in a long time.”

“Yes, well. This house is _very_ good at that.” There was a long silence. With Lucille there, it was impossible for her to examine the kitchen properly — although how she’d planned to do so anyway, she didn’t know — but Edith found herself unwilling to leave her on her own. 

“Do you…” Lucille began and then trailed off into silence. “Do you have regrets, Edith?” She sounded strangely hesitant, her voice softer than usual. 

“A few,” Edith said.

“Like what?” She seemed to be searching for something in particular.

“I wish that I had told my mother I loved her more. And my father. And…” She shook her head. “Any number of things, really.”

“Do you regret coming here?”

Edith raised her eyebrows, surprised by the question. Her first instinct was to make an easy lie of it, but somehow the words couldn’t come. 

“Sometimes,” she said. 

“And what does _sometimes_ mean?” Lucille pressed. 

“I — I don’t know. Certain days, certain times of day…” _Never when I’m with you,_ she added silently. _Never when you read to me or you talk to me. But I’m so afraid that you’re going to hurt me — that you_ are _hurting me — that I could never say this out loud._ She looked away, feeling gagged. _I shouldn’t feel this way._ _Not about you._

But Lucille was looking at her as if she had said it all anyway.

Not meeting her eyes, she turned away from the door and headed into the music room, feeling certain that Lucille would be a while before she left the kitchen. 

The piano loomed in the center of the room like a great black beast. In many ways, it reminded her of Lucille herself: beautiful and powerful, yet strangely untouchable. 

She lifted the lid, ran her fingers over the gleaming black and white keys and, hesitantly, began to play. It was part of a duet that she had learned back in her adolescence. She sat down on the bench. Her father had found a governess who could play with an almost professional skill, but she’d never had quite the same gift for it. Still, as she acclimated herself with the resistance of the keys again, it was almost enjoyable, a far cry from the lessons that she’d detested. 

A shadow fell over her, and she faltered, looking up to see Lucille standing in the doorway, watching her. 

“I —”

“Shh.”

Giving her the smallest of smiles, Lucille crossed to the piano and, with one hand, reached over to begin the second part of the duet with her left hand. Breathing out as steadily as she could manage, Edith resumed her own playing. It was difficult to keep her rhythm the same as Lucille’s.

“You know this piece?” Edith asked softly.

“It was one of the first I ever learned,” Lucille whispered back. “I tried to teach Thomas your part, but he never had the aptitude for it.”

With a creak of wood, she sat down beside Edith on the narrow bench and brought her other hand to the keys. The piano seemed to shake with the force of both of them playing it, now at full volume. Edith’s mind was concentrated foremost upon the music, but her senses wandered independently and were entirely too focused upon Lucille’s lily scent and the little sparks of contact between them whenever their hands brushed as they played. There was no conversation now; everything depended on the music. She had the most peculiar feeling that if they in any way made a mistake, this fragile connection between the two of them would break. The music, somehow, was the connection.

Lucille’s right arm flew around Edith to strike several notes in the highest octaves, effectively enveloping her between her arm and her body. Heart thudding, Edith tried to remember the notes, but she was losing the melody as the desires of her body grew increasingly insistent, the blazing within her core like fire, as insistent as it had been the other night. Lucille had taken over the pedals as well; pinned against her and serving no immediate function, Edith fought the urge to tuck her head into Lucille’s neck and breathe her in. 

With another groan of the bench, Lucille pressed closer against her, the contact between them delicious. Edith sighed without intending to do so as their left and right thighs came flush together. Her eyes and attention were no longer on the keys or the music; instead, she was looking at Lucille, and the way that some of her shorter hairs curled at the back of her neck beneath the plait wound tightly about her head. Her collar was just low enough to give her a glimpse of white vertebrae at the back of her neck— something that Edith would never have expected to stir her but that seemed, now, violently erotic. 

She’d ceased to play. It was left to Lucille to finish the strange, wild duet they’d created together. The final note rang out in the silence of the house. Edith looked away before Lucille could meet her eyes. Both were out of breath and shaken. Edith thought that it was not unlike how her body felt after one of Thomas’s more amenable moods. 

“I wasn’t aware that you played,” Lucille said at last, thumbing one key almost absently. 

“Only a little. My experience is limited.”

“I could teach you, if you like,” Lucille said. A shiver ran through Edith as she tried to imagine how those lessons would go. Out of breath and dazzled by the woman seated beside her, no doubt. “It’s not difficult. You seem to have a natural inclination.” To Edith’s dismay, she reached over and took one her hands, laying the fingers out into A-minor. “You see? You put your fingers automatically into the perfect position.”

Edith jumped to her feet, sending the stool scraping backward a little. “I’m not sure that it would be appropriate,” she said hastily. But Lucille just looked at her.

“Damn what’s appropriate,” she said at last. “If you’re so inclined, why worry?”

“Because it’s not just about the piano, and I think you’ve known that since the moment you sat down here beside me.” 

She didn’t wait for her to respond, just turned and headed quickly for the staircase. Behind her, she heard Lucille call after her but she didn’t stop. Her head hurt suddenly, like one of the migraines she used to get when she was younger. She had to go upstairs; she had to get away from the piano and Lucille and her dark, dark eyes. If she stayed, she couldn’t trust herself to do the right thing. And she _had_ to do the right thing. _She_ had to be right, even if no one else was. 

She was so engrossed in her thoughts that she barely noticed her husband emerging from the bedroom until she careened headlong into him.

“Edith,” he said, not seeming to realize her distress as he put his hands on her shoulders, “I have some things to do in town today. Some supplies have come in. Care to come with me?”

“Oh, of course,” she said, taken aback. It felt strange to be recognized in this way. But she wasn’t about to rebuff his renewed interest in her. She slipped into their bedroom to dress.

Perhaps, if she could find a way to please her husband, she could put her thoughts of his sister well out of mind.

 

It didn’t work as well as she’d hoped. Thomas’s idea of taking her into town seemed to mostly consist of him unpacking crate after crate of machinery while she stood against the wall and tried not to feel neglected. Lucille, she couldn’t help feeling, wouldn’t have let her alone so long. Not without making some word to her. She felt like a third cufflink: unnecessary and somewhat bewildering as to her purpose.

“Think lucky thoughts, Edith,” he told her as he opened yet another crate. “This could change our fortunes completely.” She gave him a wan smile and did not tell him that her thoughts were back at the house, were fixed upon the press of Lucille’s thigh against hers. 

Several townsmen — clerks at the post office, some stablehands — entered the depot wondering aloud at the snow. Did the baron and his lady want a room to stay the night? 

He looked back at her. Lately, whenever she woke cold and ill and alone, she’d soothed herself by imagining Lucille there beside her. Sometimes her imaginings turned lewd, as they had the first time, but others were more gentle, more benign. Lucille wrapping her arms around her. Lucille singing her a lullaby and holding her hand. Lucille combing and braiding her hair.

It would never happen; she was no fool. But she also knew intuitively that the change of setting would change her husband, too. If she asked him to take the room, the single act they had been skirting like the edge of a cliff would finally be performed. And then she could rest. She would, she told herself, know what it was like to have them both, in a sense. She could exorcise herself of whatever this was. Even as she thought all of this, she knew it was a cold, bitter comfort.

She stepped closer to him, surreptitiously brushed his fingertips with her own. 

“Please.”

 

It was two hours later, and snow was drifting past the window in a haze of white when he finally touched her. It felt dreamlike, unreal because of how long she had waited: she felt his hands push up her skirts; his tongue flick against her earlobe, but not for long because he was bringing his mouth lower, over her sternum and her pelvis. A thrill ran through her body. Another one, less of pleasure than possession, came when he looked back up at her with one of her legs draped over his shoulder, a now-familiar sight. But he didn’t continue, and when they finally were making love, she felt it was too soon; her body had to learn to adapt to the invasion, and she swore she could smell blood on the air. But there was his scent, too: peppery and clean, like the soap he used. Mannish, primal. And soon after, once she’d rolled him onto his back, he found the place within her that made her curl in the sheets on the good nights back at the house. She raked her fingers through his hair, her body finally opening properly to him, and bent down to kiss him. She wanted to touch every inch of him, inhale him. Nothing too close. For the moment, she ruled him, and he loved her for it. 

She was, she knew, lucky to have him.

 

The uglier thoughts didn’t come until later in the night, when they lay curled around each other, his head on her chest. Even as she stroked his hair, she couldn’t help feeling as though she had done something wrong, that something in this was not as it should have been. 

An hour later, she woke from another dream — a dark red thing behind the door, and lips that were softer than Thomas’s on her own — and realized that the heaviness in her chest was regret.

* * *

What was worse, Lucille knew it all. Miles away, tucked like a secret within the old house, she thought she could feel her brother’s heart beating faster and faster with euphoria in her own ribcage. She knew what was inevitably happening out there, somewhere. It made her sick to imagine, but it was all her mind would show her: her brother rolling into their latest victim, unstoppable. And she wouldn’t _try_ to stop him. No, she must be out there, aching for him almost as badly as Lucille herself ached.

She’d been wandering the dark corridors aimlessly. Now she stepped inside the cavernous master bedroom and looked around the shadows that her candelabra cast. Wild, vengeful thoughts flashed through her head. Burn the house. Burn the bed. Leave nothing left. 

But she did none of those things. Instead, she lay down on their bed and inhaled each of their scents: Thomas’s clean, masculine; Edith’s something vanilla that she thought she might have smelled that morning at the piano.

Of course, he would love her. Of course, he would commit this most intimate betrayal. 

_I haven’t gone near that pretty cunt,_ he’d said. And lied. 

Pretty, sweet, gentle, _safe._ All the things Lucille was not. How she’d longed for those things herself, and how oblivious Thomas of it. How could he be permitted to stray from the path for a taste of such things, when she could not? Where was the justice? 

Piano. Edith’s eyes on her. Blonde curls tumbling down a long, smooth back, a tongue between her slender legs.

She breathed in the scents from the pillows and told herself not to do this, not to hurt herself, all the while knowing that it was far too late for that. 

* * *

They returned to the house midmorning the next day, and Lucille’s white-faced horror when she saw them was enough to make Edith begin doubting her relationship with Thomas all over again. Her mind clamped down quickly on the thought. If she thought about it again, if she so much as idly wondered, it would only lead to more distrust, and then she would have to ask him for her own peace of mind. She knew herself far too well.

And then he’d be angry.

She knew him well, too.

But that wasn’t enough for her ignore the barely-contained argument she heard them having in the next room.

_“Damn it, Lucille, must you shut me out like this?”_

_“I don’t understand you anymore.”_

_“Yes, you do. I’m still the same.”_

_“Do you really believe that? Do you really believe that either of us is the same?”_

Then Thomas had come storming out of the parlor, not sparing Edith a glance as he thundered upstairs. A door slammed somewhere up above, and she flinched. 

_I’m overreacting,_ she told herself. _I’m_ _a shallow, jealous, maladjusted woman with a fixation on things that she shouldn’t._

 

But she couldn’t dismiss the evidence of her own eyes, and the sight of her husband wrapping his arms around his sister and kissing the side of her throat in the kitchen the next day was too much to be ignored. 

She stood there, frozen and unseen, as Lucille turned in his arms and pulled him back into the larder. Lucille yanking up her skirts and Thomas fumbling at his suspenders with all the eagerness and desperation that Edith had never seen directed towards herself. Her lips on his throat, below his left ear, nipping at him, her eyes closed as he hoisted her up and stepped out of Edith’s view. But she could still hear them: soft grunts and one intake of breath that must have been Lucille. 

Edith kept her composure just long enough to reach the parlor and sit down Then she put her head in her hands. Tears stabbed like knives in her eyes.

So this was the answer. 

She’d never had cause to imagine this feeling before, but now she understood how gut-clenchingly demoralizing it was to realize that, to her husband, his own sister was more desirable than she was.

 

Half an hour later, Thomas strode into the parlor where she was still sitting.

“Edith, there you are!” he said. “We’d wondered where you’d got to.”

She couldn’t look at him. He pressed his lips into her hair and then tilted her chin up to kiss her on the mouth. But when she didn’t respond, he pulled back, frowning. “What is it?

“— I have a headache,” she said, after a brief hesitation. 

Once he’d retrieved a blanket and a glass of water for her and departed the room, she leaned back in the armchair and pressed a hand to her mouth, although whether she was trying to quell her nausea or hold back the taste of both of them in her mouth, she couldn’t say. 

 

“Please stop lying to me,” she said that night as they were readying for bed. Thomas turned from the mirror to face her and frowned.

“What am I meant to be lying about?”

“You know what I mean. You and Lucille.”

“I can’t think what you mean.”

“You and Lucille. Together.”

Something dangerous flickered in his eyes. “What about us?”

“Don’t lie to me, Thomas, I can’t bear it.”

“How can I lie when I don’t understand what you’re going on about?”

_“I_ saw _you two, Thomas!”_ she snarled. “Do what you like, but _don’t_ pretend that I’m stupid!”

Pain flashed in her mouth and nose, and Edith dropped limply across the bed, holding her face. Thomas stood above her, his hand raised. 

He’d struck her.

“What the devil do you mean by that?” His voice was low, dangerous.

“Hurting me won’t change a thing,” she muttered. Tears pricked at her eyes at how her face stung. “I still know. We both still have to live with this.”

“You’re mad,” he said. He still wouldn’t lower his hand. “You’re absolutely mad.”

“Is this how little you care for me?” she exclaimed. “You won’t even give me the benefit of the truth!”

“I _have_ told you the truth!”

“You’ve lied to me every day of our marriage!” she shouted. Then she laughed bitterly, derisive. “Or was it only today that you decided you’d rather have your own sister than me?”

His eyes blazed, and she shrank back as his hands flexed. But he turned away. She heard him breathe in and out as if trying to control his temper. 

“You’re not to say that again, Edith,” he said at last. He turned back to her. His cheeks were flushed with anger. “Now. I want you to tell me exactly what you think you saw.”

She drew in a shuddering breath and made a silent appeal for patience. “I saw you _kissing_ her. And I saw her pulling up her skirt. And I saw you —” she broke off and covered her mouth. “Don’t make me say it.”

His face was a mask, marble and unreadable. Her cheek throbbed and felt twice its size. It was impossible to know what her husband was thinking, and she was startled by how badly that frightened her. 

“You’re imagining things,” he said at last. He was cool, level. This was not the man who’d struck her mere moments ago. “You’ve been ill,” he continued. “ I’ll wager this is just like those ghosts of yours.”

Resisting the urge to just acquiesce, go to sleep, and forget all of this, she shook her head. 

“It’s not my imagination,” she said. “All those times you disappeared at night… Now, they make sense…”

Thomas looked away, pushing a hand wearily through his hair. “You were _dreaming,_ Edith —”

“ _Stop it!”_ she shrieked, flying to her feet as tears pricked her eyes. “Stop _lying_ to me!”

He caught her wrists in his hands, trying to keep her from lashing out at him. “Edith — _Edith_ — you’re not yourself —”

“I’m begging you —”

“Edith, _stop_ this!” He seized her head between his hands and pressed his forehead against hers. “You need to rest. You’re very ill.”

“I’ m not ill,” Edith snarled. “I know what I saw.”

“You do _not_ ,” he shot back coldly. “You know nothing.” One hand holding her head firmly, the other traced down over her lips, down the fabric that covered her throat. “Now,” he continued in a far gentler tone, “let’s go to bed, Edith. We can forget all this. It’s just a nightmare,” he said, pressing a kiss to her jaw and ignoring how she remained stiff at the caress. “Just another nightmare…” He kissed the side of her throat, and her eyes latched onto a spot on his own neck.

She shoved him away. “I will _not_ go to bed with you,” she spat. “I never want to touch you again!” 

“You’re imagining things, Edith!” he cried.

“If I’m imagining things,” she said, “then tell me where you got that!” She pointed to the spot on his neck, where a fresh, angry-looking bitemark was just visible beneath his collar. 

He reached up and brushed his fingers over the mark, clearly felt it. For a moment, she saw fear in his eyes, then it was gone. Confirmation.

“You did that, Edith,” he said finally. “You just don’t remember.” He stepped closer, bending his head to her. “And I loved it, Edith,” he added, lips close to her own, speaking in a softer tone that made her heart beat faster even in the midst of her fury. “I’d let you do it to me again, tonight…” He reached out for her, but she stepped out of his arms, even as a voice in her head whispered not to be a fool and just agree.

“I didn’t put that mark there,” she said. “Don’t — don’t put false memories in my head, Thomas!”

“You did this, Edith!” he cried. The angry spots of color in his cheeks were coming back. “I don’t know what else to tell you!”

“Yes, you do!” she shot back. “You could be honest with me!”

“I have been honest!”

“I didn’t put that mark there!” she cried. “Lucille did! Lucille, because you’ve been sneaking off to her for months! Do you _love_ her?” she asked. “Is _that_ what this is?”

“Of course I love her, she’s my sister!”

“You don’t love her like that.” She shook her head, staring at him. 

“Life isn’t a penny dreadful,” Thomas snarled. “I suggest you return to the real world.”

“I have! I’ve been in the real world ever since I saw you — you _copulating_ with her in the kitchen today!”

And suddenly she was on her back on the bed, pinned beneath Thomas. The wind had left her lungs. Her hands flapped uselessly against the pressure against her wrists. He was so much larger than she was: before, the difference between them had stirred her, but now, a dark, ice-cold current of terror was slipping into her stomach. For the first time, she realized just how badly he could hurt her, were he to try.

“Lucille and I do so much to keep you comfortable here, and this is how you respond? If you accuse me of that again,” he hissed, forehead pressed against hers, “I will lock you in this room and leave you to those bloody ghosts and those inane stories you write.” His nails dug into her skin.

“You’re hurting me!” Her voice was strangled beneath his weight.

“Who have you become, Edith?” he demanded. “What sort of person are you?”

“I could ask you the same question! Do you think I’m stupid as well as blind?” Edith cried, kicking in a vain attempt to dislodge him. “You don’t give a damn about me!”

He let go of one wrist and yanked a handful of her hair. Her eyes watered. “That’s ridiculous,” he snarled. “Do you truly think that because I wouldn’t _fuck_ you, I must be _fucking_ my own sister?” She stared at him, startled by the words she’d never expected to hear him say out loud. “Wasn’t last night enough for you?”

“You’ve changed,” she insisted. “You’re not the man I met back home.”

“I haven’t changed,” he said. “You have.” He pulled her hair again, harder and tighter this time. She squealed in her throat, high-pitched and hysterical, and he shoved his hand over her mouth. “You’re not to say anything like this again, do you hear me?” he said. She just stared at him, wide-eyed. His fingers had covered her nose as well, making it difficult for her to breathe.He sighed impatiently and yanked her hair a third time, and her breath caught in her throat. “ _Do you hear me?”_

She nodded sharply, just once, and then he crawled off her, moving to the other side of the bed, where he sat, his head low. He pulled at his lower lip with nervous fingers and did not look at her. She didn’t look at him either.

There was an ugly silence. Edith thought she could hear Lucille moving about above and almost wished that she’d come interrupt them. Anything to spare her this. Her face throbbed in time with her pulse.

“I’m sorry, Edith,” he muttered at last, wearily. She just lay there, not wanting to acknowledge him, not daring to speak for fear she’d provoke another attack. He reached over and took her hand, began rubbing at her wrist as if trying to make amends for earlier. “I don’t want to hurt you. I really don’t. I love you so much.” She made no comment. She had nothing to say. For the first time in her memory, her mind was a blank. 

He stroked her hair back and kissed her. His tongue slipped into her mouth, but she lay passive and still beneath him, and finally, he recognized that she would not reciprocate and left her alone.

Only once she’d heard the metallic screech of the elevator descending did she crawl from the bed and settle into the space between it and the wall. She didn’t cry, but covered her face with her fingers, trembling hard and trying to remember the words to a prayer, any prayer, as if an appeal to God would save her from what she had entered into, as willing and naive as a blinded kitten.

 

“Edith.”

It was morning, and Edith had taken refuge in the library. She looked around from her manuscript to find her husband standing between the bookshelves, looking as though he had something he wanted to say. She didn’t speak, just sat there and waited for him to continue.

“I’m sorry about last night,” he said. He came closer, and she resisted the urge to edge away in her chair. “My behavior was reprehensible. Please, forgive me.”

She looked down at her manuscript, staring hard until the letters blurred together. Her eyes were hot and damp. Her wrists still ached, mottled with a smattering of pale blue bruises where he’d held her. 

They’d slept together that night — what else would they have done? He’d attempted to touch her cheek, but she’d pulled away and slept at the far edge of the bed to avoid any chance that he might come near her. 

“Edith,” he said softly, “please. I don’t mean to hurt you.”

She thought of Buffalo, the words he’d hurled at her with an almost cruel sort of enjoyment, as though he liked tearing her apart at the seams, seeing the tears fill her eyes, the hurt. As much as he seemed to have liked it when she struck him. Wasn’t that funny? An eye for an eye, as they say…

_Yes, you do mean to hurt me_ , Edith thought. _You always mean to._ But she said nothing. She blinked hard, and a tear slipped down her cheek.

“Oh, Edith.”

He reached out to her, and she immediately flinched from his hand. 

After a moment’s hesitation, Thomas followed through and brushed the tear away. Her cheeks flamed. How could she have been so stupid? Why would he hurt her? Hadn’t he just apologized?

The words felt thick in her mouth, especially as her throat closed hard. More tears trembled on her lashes.

“I forgive you.”

He pressed his lips to her forehead, unknowing or uncaring of how her body recoiled against the sensation, and left the library. Doubtless bound for his workshop or his machine, something he could love and hurt as much as he liked. And never have to apologize to. She wondered if that’s what he would have preferred: a silent wife who saw nothing, thought nothing, and could feel nothing. A metal heart and dead nerves. No mind save for gears that never moved. 

The tears were coming again. And something new — anger. Hot and roiling. It swept through her like desire had the other night, but more powerful and volatile. 

She seized the wolf-shaped paperweight from her desk and hurled it at the wall. It bounced off with a _slam_ that echoed around the library and within her own head, creating a throbbing behind her eyes. Groaning, she pressed her hands against the sides of her head in an effort to combat the growing pain in her head. She thought she might have liked to scream, but she couldn’t do that, she couldn’t let him know how much he hurt her. Couldn’t give him the satisfaction. 

Several sobs _did_ hiccup out of her, unstoppable and painful. She felt like a child again, infantilized and frightened. 

Blinking hard again, she wiped her eyes and realized that someone else was standing amid the bookshelves: Lucille, several sheaves of sheet music in hand, who had stopped and was watching her.

Her eyes were horrified and damp.

Edith opened her mouth to speak — how much had she heard, how much had she seen, and above all, how _could_ she — but Lucille was already walking away, head low, her footsteps hollow on the wooden floors.


	3. Possession

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Don’t you see?” she said thickly. “I can’t trust him. I can’t trust you. There’s no one here on my side.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Enjoy my little nod to The Duchess in this chapter's dialogue. Chapter-specific warning for sexual assault and a lengthy musing on the subject.

When Lucille was a child, she had once experimentally eaten an acorn to see how it tasted, only to discover that it was just as gritty and bitter as her nurse had warned her it would be. It was that same sick feeling that now settled into her stomach as she fled down the steps that led to the kitchen. Her mind raced, running through the logistics: Thomas would be hours at his machine; no doubt Edith would want her privacy; so no one would find Lucille…

She was only half-conscious of the last two-thirds of that thought as the rest of her brain seized on her brother’s name and raged.

Through the spaces between the books on the shelves, she had seen him reach out to Edith, only for Edith to flinch away. And then, moments after he’d left her, her fit had come. Lucille knew the signs only too well; it was the behavior of a tiger who realizes he’s been caged and cannot quite believe it. 

She’d felt the same, back during the first year at the sanatorium. 

But she wasn’t to think of that anymore, she told herself as she slumped against the kitchen table, her knees giving way. 

She didn’t want to believe it. Gripping the sides of the table hard enough that her knuckles blanched, she reminded herself that she had no hard proof that anything was amiss. _Have you seen him raise a hand to her?_ she asked herself. _Have you seen him be cruel to her, or do anything beyond the minimum of courtesy she’d expect?_

_Of course you haven’t,_ a part of her whispered. _He’s too skilled a dissembler for that._

She couldn’t allow herself to suspect him of this. Not him. Not _Thomas._

She wanted so badly to cry, but her icy nature wouldn’t allow it.

_No proof, no tears,_ she told herself. _You mustn't jump to conclusions._

But she couldn’t forget the sight of Edith on the bed days before, sobbing as though Thomas had torn the ring from her finger and ordered her gone. Did he have the capacity to hurt someone like that? Experience told her yes — all men did, in their way.

But not Thomas. Not _her_ Thomas.

_But it well may be,_ she told herself grimly, _that my Thomas and hers are different sorts of men._

 

An hour later, after she’d shored up enough courage, she went in search of Edith and found her asleep on the divan in the parlor, a blanket spread over her. Blonde curls tumbled over the side, just brushing the dusty carpet, and as she stood frozen in the doorway, Lucille was reminded of the fairy stories she’d read as a girl and was seized by the terrible desire to kiss her awake. 

But that was another thing she couldn’t allow herself. 

As she approached the divan, she was overcome with a sense of dread. If she was honest with herself, she knew what she would find were she to perform the same ritual that she had just a few days before. 

She wanted to run from the room.

What if Edith woke? 

A small voice in her mind asked if that would be so awful.

But this was not the time for schoolgirlish daydreaming. Lucille had to know. How could she go on otherwise? 

Carefully, she pulled back the cuff of Edith’s sleeve the way she had before, but before she could really look, Edith stirred and looked up at her in bewilderment. Hastily, Lucille feigned tucking the blanket more closely around her. 

“What time is it?” asked Edith vaguely. She sounded as though she were still half-asleep. Her eyes were puffy, as though she had been crying. 

Lucille tucked a lock of blonde hair behind her ear. “Nearly four. Sleep. I’ll wake you when it’s time for tea.”

She was looking up at her with that direct gaze that made Lucille feel as though she had overestimated the number of steps on a staircase. That sickening moment of oblivion. No safety. She was suddenly all too conscious of Edith’s delicate, birdlike body beneath her blankets and layers of clothing. Of her own heart beating faster and faster in her ribcage. 

Her mouth was dry. 

She wet her lips. “Edith —”

But Edith suddenly pushed the blanket off and sat up. “I should go,” she muttered. Lucille put a hand on her shoulder, and Edith twisted around to look at where she touched her. Then she met her eyes.

They were inches apart. 

Lucille looked at her lips, her own parted as her breath quickened and her heart hammered. 

Warmth. Edith had laid her hand over hers. Her fingertips were soft, smooth as a child’s. Gently, as though afraid that Lucille would pull away, Edith brought Lucille’s hand up to her cheek, rested it against her knuckles. 

It was every dream, every fantasy that Lucille had been enacting in her head. She was breathless, she was lightheaded with the victory. 

But she was also a victim and an opportunist, and so her eyes flicked down to the exposed skin of Edith’s wrist where the sleeve of her dress had been drawn back. 

A thick cuff of bluish-purple bruises wrapped around her wrist, as though Thomas had painted them on. 

_No. Nononononononono…_

Edith followed her gaze and immediately dropped Lucille’s hand and rose, turning away. 

“Edith —” To Lucille’s horror, her voice was thick, her nose stinging as though she were about to cry, as much for Edith’s leaving as her discovery. “Edith, wait —”

“I won’t stay here —” Edith was insisting, already heading for the door. “I can’t — I can’t —”

“Edith —!” Lucille stopped her in the doorway, turning her by her shoulder back to face her. She wasn’t weeping, but her eyes were red and damp. “Tell me,” she whispered. “It’s all right. You can trust me.”

But Edith shook her head. “Don’t you see?” she said thickly. “I can’t trust him. I can’t trust you. There’s no one here on my side.”

“You can trust _me!”_

“Can I?” Edith’s gaze was as clear as it was full of tears. “Can I really, Lucille?”

She thought of the jar of poison in the kitchen pantry, of Thomas pressing inside her in the attic, in her bedroom, all over the house as though Edith were never there. 

She drew a shuddering breath as the first tears fell over her lashes — not of protest, but of shame. _She knows everything._

Edith was watching her with something that approached pity in her eyes. Or was that grief? Regret? There was too much to name, there. Too much that entranced her. Blue, blue, blue… 

“You have to let me go, Lucille,” she said, shook free of Lucille’s grasp, and headed across the corridor for the elevator.

“If things were otherwise,” Lucille called after her hastily before she could go too far, “what would you do? What would you decide?”

Edith looked back at her, one foot already in the elevator. 

“Do you think that matters?” she asked brokenly and slid the grille across before Lucille could say anything more.

*

Teatime brought them all together again. Seated on the divan beside Thomas and across from Lucille, Edith felt as though she were in a cave with two dragons. 

After her encounter with Lucille, she had run to the master bedroom and taken refuge there, crying into her pillow so the strange acoustics of the house wouldn’t carry the sound down to Lucille. 

_I would tell you everything — how afraid I am, how I feel for you and for him. I would kiss you until I turned numb. I would make love to you all night long._

But all that was beside the point, and now here she was, taking tea with her would-be murderers, who were dearer to her than she wanted. 

Thomas sat quite casually at her side, sipping his tea, eyes focused on nothing in particular. One arm stretched across the back of the divan, wrapping around her shoulders without ever touching her. She felt the same paralysis she had last night — don’t move, don’t provoke him, say nothing. 

Across from them, Lucille didn’t speak. She looked as though she, too, had been crying. 

Edith took her teacup from her saucer and took a small sip. She hadn’t forgotten the words of the apparition in the bathroom, and when she thought about it, the idea of them attempting to kill her seemed all too believable. 

But why would they feel the need to make her love them first?

Her teacup rattled against her saucer, and Thomas surreptitiously pressed his leg against hers, probably trying to comfort her. 

She crossed her left leg over her right and angled herself away. 

“Thomas?” He looked up immediately at the sound of Lucille’s voice, with a puppyish sort of eagerness. Was he even trying to pretend anymore? Or had it always been this way, and she was only now noticing it?

“Thomas, where did you put my Henry James?” Lucille was asking.

“I thought I put it back in the library,” Thomas said. 

“Well, I checked there and didn’t find it.”

“Might have left it upstairs,” he muttered and, with a small sigh, put his cup and saucer down and stood. Edith didn’t watch him leave.

In an instant, Lucille was on her feet and was kneeling down in front of her, was taking the cup and saucer out of her hands.

“Don’t drink that,” she said. “Ever.”

Edith stared at her. “What are you doing?” Lucille was swapping Edith’s cup for her own, pressing it into her hand. It was warm against her palm. 

“I don’t ask forgiveness,” she said. “Just for a chance to make this right.”

The tea in her cup trembled. Edith put it down on the table, wanting to believe her and yet afraid that everything was false. “Nobody tells me the truth. I don’t know what’s real,” she said in a rush. “I can’t even trust my own memories anymore. It’s like — like an arithmetic problem where I have all the numbers, but the total never comes out. Just tell me — _tell_ me what’s real. I can’t trust myself anymore. I can’t trust anyone.”

“I know,” Lucille said. “Everything you thought, everything you suspected — it’s all real. All of it. We —” her throat bobbed — “we planned to kill you.”

Edith nearly wept again at the relief of being confirmed _right._ But there was more she had to know.

“You and Thomas. What about the two of you?”

A new furrow appeared in Lucille’s brow. “We,” she said carefully, like a skater testing the ice, “were lovers. We are.”

She shouldn’t have been shocked or surprised by the truth, but Edith still found her eyes stinging. She couldn’t meet her sister-in-law’s gaze. “I thought we — I thought you — that you _liked_ me.” It was an inadequate word, and they both knew it. 

“I’m going to fix this,” Lucille whispered. “I promise you. And I _do_ like you. I _do.”_

“How?” asked Edith. “How can you fix it?” 

“I’ll find a way.” Lucille touched her hand, and Edith looked down to see their fingers entwine. “I promise.” She dropped her voice. “I know he’s hurting you. Tell me how I can help, and I’ll do it.” 

“Why bother?” asked Edith. “You could kill me and have him to yourself.”

“Why bother?” Lucille echoed. “Edith… you know why. I _know_ that you know.”

Thomas would be back soon, but the threat of his presence had dulled to background noise with Lucille gazing at her that way, silver-blue, cold and yet so warm… 

Lucille’s blue skirts frothed around her as she lifted Edith’s hand to her lips. Kissed her knuckles. Kissed her palm, the underside of her wrist — holding her hand delicately so she wouldn’t press against the bruises. Edith shuddered through her first sob of the hour. 

“He’ll be back soon,” she whispered. Lucille looked up at her, and she knew that she had understood her meaning: _we haven’t the time for niceties._

She rose up on her knees and pressed her forehead against Edith’s, their noses brushing together. 

“Don’t hurt me,” Edith whispered, heart pounding, and pressed her lips to hers.

Once, when Edith was much younger, she had taken off her shoes and stockings on a rainy day and gone down to the end of the street to splash into the deep puddle of rainwater that had collected in the ditch. It had been late autumn, and she’d gotten dirty water all over her frock, but the initial burst of coldness against her skin had seemed to electrify her. Even as her governess came to scold her and take her back inside, she had looked around the world and felt more alive than ever, her feet and calves numb, her mind crystalline.

Kissing Lucille felt that way.

Her hands hovered inches from her, frightened that if she touched her beyond this, the spell would break, and it would be Thomas there instead.

Then Lucille ran a hand down the side of her throat to rest on her breastbone, and Edith kissed her again.

“He’ll be back any moment,” Lucille said, echoing her earlier words.

“I don’t care.”

It was convergence, it was catharsis, it was Lucille’s tongue in her mouth, and Edith nearly slipping off the divan into her lap, it was the scent of Lucille’s hair and the salty taste of Lucille’s tears on her own lips, the blaze of desire in her belly that peaked as Lucille wrapped a hand around her waist and tugged her closer against herself. It was ice cold clarity and yet senselessness. It was the velvet of Lucille’s frock beneath her fingers and the step of an intruder just outside the parlor.

They pulled away from each other.

There wasn’t time for Lucille to return to her own place. As it was, they were just able to put a few inches of distance between each other before Thomas entered the room and all the warmth disappeared. Edith reached for the cup Lucille had given her and took a sip — the lack of bitterness a shock to her senses — as she looked away from her husband to hide the blush rising to her face and neck. 

Thomas stood there in the doorway for several moments, his eyes on them. 

“I found your book, Lu,” was all he said, taking the long way around the parlor to place it by the chair Lucille had vacated. “It was in the library.”

“I — I must not have been looking in the right place,” Lucille said vaguely and returned with dignity to her chair, taking Edith’s cup and saucer with her.

“No, I imagine not.” The divan creaked as Thomas sat down beside Edith again. Her cup rattled her saucer as her hands shook. “Are you well, Edith?” he asked her. She forced herself to look at him and immediately saw him as he’d been the night before, face pressed close to hers, yanking her hair back as though he’d pull it free of her scalp entirely.

“Edith?” 

She forced herself back to the present. “I’m sorry?”

“I said, are you well?”

She took another sip of tea and didn’t miss how his eyes locked onto the movement. “Just a little tired,” she lied. 

His gaze lingered on her, brow furrowed, and to Edith, it felt hot and shaming.

 

When she bathed later that night, she was struck by how much weight she had lost.

Standing naked in front of the mirror in the bathroom and taking in the sharpness of her ribs, the depth of her cheeks, she wondered how she could have missed it before. Surely she hadn’t been _so_ ill? But then she recalled how low her appetite had been of late due to the illness — no, the _poison_ , she had been right all along — in addition to the added stress of Thomas’s fluctuating moods. 

But she hadn’t realized how drastic the change had been. She was more skeleton than woman. A ghost, even.

_They’ve hurt me so badly,_ she thought. Then she remembered Lucille’s mouth on hers, her fingers against her throat. _I don’t ask forgiveness,_ she’d said. _Just for a chance to make this right._

Could she allow herself to put matters solely into Lucille’s dispatch? She looked down at her hands — which were almost white in the green light of the bathroom. The bruises were black against her skin. 

_It seems I’ll have to._

She hung her dressing gown over her reflection and bathed with her eyes closed. She’d half hoped that Lucille might slip into the bathroom with her, but clearly, it was too early for that. She remained alone.

 

She came to bed late, her fingers and toes still wrinkled from the water and her hair dripping cold down her spine. She changed in the darkness and then crept into bed beside her husband, who seemed to be asleep. Then she heard him roll over and murmur something.

“Darling?”

“You took a long time,” he repeated. He reached out and touched her hair. She lay passively, eyes closed. She felt his lips brush against her cheek, and then a rustle of bedclothes and a shift of weight told her that he’d settled back down beside her. 

She rolled over, but he clearly wasn’t finished talking. 

“Edith,” he continued, “if there were something… that you needed to tell me… I hope that you would. Tell me.”

She heard his tone and knew that he was addressing the kiss that he hadn’t seen but must have been aware of. But she couldn’t respond. Not if she wanted to protect Lucille and this fragile thing they were constructing together.

“I have nothing to say,” she whispered.

“And I hope you know that I love you?” he pressed. She felt his lips against her shoulders. “I don’t think,” he continued, “that I could bear it if something were to happen to us.”

“Nothing will happen to us,” she said, in a tone that she hoped would settle the matter for now. 

Thomas reached out and touched her cheek in the darkness, and Edith told herself not to shy away. _He won’t hurt me, he won’t hurt me,_ she chanted to herself, not really believing it. In a way, she pitied him. She was lying to him the same way he had lied to her. 

She let him kiss her. They kissed in the same manner, he and his sister. With a sick little twist in her gut, she realized that they’d probably learned from each other. 

“I’m glad we’re back to the way things were,” he murmured. 

“Yes.”

“Do you love me?”

“Yes.” She did. That was the damnable part of it.

His hands slid over her breasts as his tongue brushed against hers. “May I?” His voice was soft, one hand brushing down her stomach. She nodded and kissed his throat. The bite mark that had spurred their argument the other night was rough beneath her tongue. She pretended it wasn’t there, that Thomas himself wasn’t there and that instead, it was Lucille who reached between her legs and gently brushed her fingers against Edith’s flesh. 

Thomas stroked himself with one hand, crawling backward so he could kiss her between her thighs. 

_Lucille Lucille Lucille…_

She absently wondered if they were both thinking of her. 

Lucille kissing her, Lucille pushing up her skirts, Lucille’s lips against her eyelids, her throat, nipping at her shoulders and her hipbones. She thought — as Thomas kissed his way up to her breasts, closing his eyes as he sucked on one nipple through the fabric of her nightdress— that she would want to make love to her naked. She had had her fill of linen sticking wetly to her skin. Besides, she wanted to see Lucille as well, kiss her breasts the way that Thomas did, make her moan…

She came back to herself just enough to realize that Thomas was pressing against her opening, stroking back her hair from her forehead.

“We love each other, don’t we?” Thomas said. He sounded almost urgent. 

She nodded, growing impatient. “Of course —” 

He pushed in, and as Edith bit her lip — like the night at the post office, she wasn’t quite ready, and he had to do it in several small thrusts, soft moans in her ear — she wondered what it would be like to have her like Thomas did her. To kiss her between her legs, to fit her fingers there and coax out pleasure. She wondered how she sounded when she came. Would she be silent or would she cry out like Edith did? 

She reached down and rubbed circles over her bud, wrapping her legs around Thomas’s waist to push him deeper. 

Lucille had kissed her, had stroked her throat as though she wanted to go further. She wished now that she hadn’t run away from her before. They could have made better use of their time than crying. 

She opened her eyes.

Thomas had ceased moving and was staring down at her. In the darkness, it was impossible to read his expression. 

“What is it?” she asked breathlessly. 

“You could,” he said, somewhat unsteadily, “at least have the decency to pretend.”

“What?” 

He thrust in deeply, and she hissed.

“My name is Thomas,” he said bitterly. “Thomas, all right?”

All at once, she realized what she must have done. 

“Thomas,” she began urgently, “Thomas, I didn’t —”

“Didn’t what?” he interrupted scathingly. “Didn’t _mean_ it?”

“Thomas —!”

“You told me you loved me!” There was a broken edge to his voice, half sounding like a sob. 

“I do!”

“Then why not act like it?” 

“Thomas —” she gulped as tears pricked her eyes — “let’s just sleep, I don’t — I don’t want to fight or — or —”

“No,” Thomas snarled. “You _never_ want to fight. You’ll do anything to avoid a confrontation.” He thrust inside her again, and she gritted her teeth. 

“Thomas, please, it won’t happen again—” She was babbling, trying to push him away. 

“Say my name,” he begged her with another thrust. “Just _say_ it.”

“Will you just —”

“Like you did hers!”

Edith shoved her hands against his shoulders, but he grabbed them and forced them over her head against the pillows. “Let’s just sleep,” she begged him. “I don’t want a fight. We can talk about this tomorrow!”

With a grunt, she kicked out with her legs and knocked him free of her. He fell back, clutching his mouth; her knee had caught him there.

Edith slumped back, horrified, tears slipping down her cheeks. 

“I’m so sorry,” she whispered.

“For _what_.”

_For hurting you. For saying it. For not being careful. For marrying you._

“— for it all,” she said at last. 

There was silence, broken only by their labored breaths. She could see his eyes glittering. There was a wet sound in the darkness: he was beginning to weep, pressing his fist to his mouth, his eyes still upon her.

“Thomas —”

He held up a hand, and she closed her mouth. 

“Just — _don’t_.”

She wondered how they had reached this point. If she were to find a way to tell her months-younger self in Buffalo that this would be the culmination of their relationship, she would never have believed it. She had been so in love with him. She had been so blind.

He was still watching her, his sobs softer than they had been before. His gaze made her feel ill.

_I am so sorry. So sorry._

Abruptly, he leaned forward and kissed her hard, as though he were trying to find their old love there. She turned away, and he paused over her, mouth just brushing the lobe of her left ear.

Abruptly, he pushed her thighs apart and slid inside her again. She hissed, more in surprise than anything else, and tried to push him off, but this was inevitable, it seemed. 

“Thomas —” she began through gritted teeth. “Let’s just —”

“Shhh…” Still guiding himself back and forth, he stroked her side in a manner that was probably intended to be soothing. “Shh, it’s all right, it’s all right —” He wasn’t especially careful about it, his thrusts ill-executed and barely reaching the spot she liked. Edith turned her face away from him and focused on the weave of the pillow against her cheek, its dusty scent, the wet marks her hair had left on the linen, the sweat that gathered behind her knees, at the base of her spine, between their bellies as his moved against hers.

“I just want you, Edith,” he was saying, head buried in her neck as his thrusts grew quicker. “Can’t I want you?” 

His hand slipped down to grip her thigh more tightly.

“ _Ow —”_

But he didn’t hear her above the chanting of her name, like a series of Hail Mary’s. Once, in another place, it might have stirred her, but now she felt merely complicit in his want.

“Will you say it?” he asked, pausing at one point. 

She didn’t look at him. “Say what.”

He kissed her temple with an incongruous gentleness. “You know what I want to hear. Just give me that. I don’t care if it’s true, I just need to _hear_ …”

Of course. If she said his name, it meant he’d done nothing wrong. She looked back at him. He was gazing at her imploringly, large eyes liquid in the darkness. 

He wanted absolution for what he was doing. 

He could live with disappointment. 

They stared at each other, at an impasse, for a long moment, and then Thomas gave in and rolled back into her again. 

Not once through the long, interminable minutes of clenched muscles and gritted teeth did she take her eyes from his face — not even when he gave a coughing sort of sigh and slick warmth spread within her.

He withdrew and left the bed. A moment later, water sloshed into the basin on the dresser. She listened to him splash it on his face and neck, listened to his panting breath.

“Is there,” he began, voice cracking, “anything you need, Edith? Anything I can —”

“Yes,” Edith said.

“What is it?”

“I would like to sleep,” she said coldly and rolled over, not bothering to listen to whatever he said next.

He didn’t return to bed, and she didn’t care.

*

The moment she heard him knock on her bedroom door, Lucille was on her feet and striding over to open it. 

_“What the hell do you think you’re playing at?”_

They said it simultaneously, but Lucille wasted no time on wondering at it. Instead, she struck him across the face with the back of her hand, slamming the door behind him and striking him again when he protested.

“Lucy — Lucy —!”

“Have you forgotten what we agreed when we began this?”

“Have you?” he shot back. 

“What are you talking about?”

“Don’t think I don’t know,” he snapped. The mark of her hands on his cheek was deep red, like wine stains. “Neither of you are being especially clever about it.”

She pushed aside the horrible chill of fear at his words and shot back: “You’re hurting her. You’re not supposed to be hurting her.”

“I thought she was supposed to die like the others,” Thomas said. “Although now that I see that she’s had such an effect on you, I wonder that you don’t throw away the poison and make her a permanent resident!”

“Don’t turn this into a reflection of me!” Lucille seized him by his wrist. “I saw the marks on her hands. What have you been _doing_ to her?”

He pushed her away and turned his back to her, pressing his hands to his head. “Please don’t, Lucy. I —”

“She was _terrified_ when I found out.” She spun him around by his shoulder and backed him against the wall. Several moths that had been devouring the rose-colored wallpaper fluttered away to avoid being crushed. “What happened?”

“She discovered us!” Thomas cried. “She saw us in the kitchen the other day. She was hysterical. I — I lost my temper. It was unforgivable.”

“ _It was unforgivable?”_ Lucille echoed in disbelief. She grabbed his collar and slapped him again, ignoring his cry of pain. “What do you think we’re doing? We’re surviving,” she said, answering herself before Thomas could speak. “We’re not — _abusing_ them for our own amusement!” She shook her head. “Have a little pity.”

But Thomas was weeping where she had pinned him, insect-like, to the wall, and she was beginning to feel all too strongly the desire to forgive him and pull him into her arms. Then she remembered Edith’s look of terror when she’d uncovered the bruises, and the sight of Edith sobbing on the bed. 

“I don’t want you near her again,” she said weakly.

“I have to go to bed with her every night. That’d be difficult to arrange, wouldn’t you say?” He sounded as weary as she felt. But his words brought up another fear of hers; and this time, she did not think of Edith, but of herself, and the constant fear of the attendant’s footsteps outside her cell, dreading the moment he would open the door with his jangling ring of keys and advance to her cot. 

But the words she wanted to say stuck in her throat, and try as she might, she couldn’t make herself say them to Thomas. 

She let go of his collar and turned away to go to the window. It was impossible to see outside, save for the gibbous moon and the stars.

Footsteps creaked behind her.

“Please promise me you’ll be better,” she said as he wrapped his arms around her, buried his head in her shoulder.

“Please promise me that you’ll — that you’ll —” He stopped short, and Lucille realized detachedly his dilemma: he couldn’t really complain of her feelings for Edith without compromising his own. 

What a farce they played.

“That I’ll what, Thomas?”

He turned her face with one finger to look at him. “If I’m not to be cruel, you’re not to be kind.” 

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“You do.”

She couldn’t lie to him. “It’s not for you to judge me,” she said, sinking onto the bed. 

“You’re _mine_ ,” he said. “I need you with me, Lucy.”

“And are you not also mine?”

“It was a mistake,” Thomas said. He threaded his fingers with hers and pressed them to his lips. “I haven’t touched her like that since that night.”

“But how can I trust you?”

“Lucy?”

“How,” she asked coldly, “can I trust you?”

“The way you used to?” He said it in confusion, the way a child might. “Didn’t we always trust each other in the old days? Why can’t we have that back?”

Lucille pulled her hand from his. “Because you’ve betrayed that trust, Thomas. Why should I trust you when you’ve behaved like every other man we’ve ever known?”

“Lucy, I —”

“No,” she snapped. “No. Don’t try to defend yourself to me. You’ve made her the same frightened thing I was.” She shook her head, staring at him. “I didn’t think you were capable of it. But now I see that you’re just like him.”

“Him?”

“ _Father._ ” She bit the word out, and for a moment was filled with a cruel sort of joy at the sick look of remembrance that came over him. Then empathy came and destroyed that joy. 

They stared at each other, both of them recalling any number of memories — Thomas’s face turning blue above his father’s hands, Lucille’s fingers bleeding from the switch, the screams of their mother rising from the floor. 

With a sob, Thomas fell to his knees and buried his head in her chest, shaking as she wrapped her arms around him.

“I won’t hurt her again, I promise.”

“Thomas, I’m so sorry —”

“What have I done?” he was chanting to himself. “What have I done, what have I done, what have I done…”

 

Sex was furtive and joyless, a force of habit more than real desire. Afterward, as Thomas rested his head on her chest and allowed her to stroke his hair, Lucille thought of Edith lying lonely in bed on the floor below and wondered how she could have become so badly entangled within this drama.

*

When Edith woke the next morning, she found Thomas at the basin on the dresser, shaving. Firm scrapes of the razor, staring blankly into his own reflection. 

She sat up in bed and pushed the covers back. The wood floor was cool beneath the soles of her feet, and her neck was stiff. Rubbing at it, she watched him until she’d caught his eye.

He didn’t hold her gaze for very long.

Sleep had pulled her skirt up around her thighs; when she looked down, she saw a mottled collection of bruises and crescents from fingernails. Nausea swept through her, and she pushed her skirt down to cover it. 

“What happened last night,” she began, but Thomas lowered his razor, looking at her reflection in the mirror, and she lost her nerve. 

“Let’s just forget it, Edith,” he said at last.

“You can forget it,” she said, “if you like. But I can’t.” Her husband resumed shaving. The razor made sandpapery sounds against his skin. “Are you going to apologize to me, or must I beg you for that, too?” When he made no reply, still not looking at her, she gritted her teeth together. “Why do you treat me like this?”

A final scrape of the razor removed the last of the white lather from his face and neck. He turned to face her. In the early days of their marriage, she’d like to watch him shave because when he kissed her afterward, his chin and cheeks were baby-smooth, and he smelled clean, like mornings after rain storms. The memory made a little pang in her chest.

“I love you,” he said simply. “And yet loving you is a betrayal of the woman I shouldn’t love and yet do. And now that _you_ and my sister —” he broke off, looking away from her and shaking his head. “I don’t care about the moral implications of it,” he said. “But —” he sighed. “Why _her?_ The one thing I’ve ever had of my own!”

Edith didn’t reply. She couldn’t think of anything to say.

“My love for you,” he continued at last, “is the most natural thing I possess. And yet I can do _nothing._ ”

She gazed at him for a while. “Poor you,” she said at last.

Thomas said something more, but his words were drowned out by new twistings of nausea in her belly as she looked at him. Her ears roared, her nightdress grew hot. She rose sharply, but to her dismay, the room slid to the left. 

“I can’t — I can’t look at you,” she said thickly as she fought to regain her balance. Then she bolted for the bathroom across the corridor to empty her belly into the sink.

 

She was silent later that morning at breakfast. Lucille poured her tea for which she had no appetite, no matter how drinkable it had become — the tell-tale bitterness was entirely absent. Lucille really had stopped, it seemed. Thomas didn’t seem hungry either; he ate a piece of toast and then retreated upstairs to the attic workshop.

Lucille sat across from her, a furrow in her brow and something grim in her eyes.

“Something’s wrong. What’s happened?”

Edith shook her head, staring into the milky clouds in her tea. Was it worth discussing? Lucille may have stopped poisoning her, but she was still devilishly difficult to pin down. Were a few kisses and not killing her reason enough to trust her — that is, enough to confide in her with _this?_

To her relief, the marks of his hand on her thighs hadn’t faded. They hurt when she pressed her thumb into it. Her thighs were raw and stung against the fabric of her drawers; she’d rubbed some salve into them, but that had just made the pain worse. But she was glad. All of it was proof that she wasn’t overreacting. That she wasn’t imagining things.

That this wasn’t normal.

It had never been explained to her outright, the concept of rape. Vague allusions in classical literature and, in novels, delicately-worded scenes that always seemed to end at the most crucial moment had been her only real education in what it was. The rest she’d had to piece together from whispered conversations behind hands at parties: Mrs. Kean’s youngest suddenly not as marriageable as she had been before, another woman slamming the door on her husband to prevent some act that was never named, skirted like the edge of a cliff. Perhaps because of that, she found it difficult to reconcile her admittedly scant knowledge with last night. _Rape_ was, well… 

_Not_ a silent struggle in the marriage bed, a furtive groping for whatever he wanted, with the sheets tangled around their limbs. A bitter, domestic sort of evil. She felt sick merely attributing the word to her own life. 

He was her husband; marriage eliminated the possibility, didn’t it?

But if that was so, why did she feel as though Thomas had carved out her insides? Why did she only feel like half a woman? 

“Edith?” 

The sound of Lucille’s voice brought her back to herself, and she realized in horror that she had begun to cry: gasping, childish sobs, one hand pressed over her mouth in an effort to silence herself. 

Lucille reached across the table and touched her free hand. She did it quite gently, with the same care that she’d used when brushing her hair nearly a month ago. Edith dropped her gaze and remembered the feeling of the brush against her scalp, the closeness of Lucille behind her. 

Her kisses.

She wanted so badly to be strong. That was what her mother and father would have wanted. _Be strong, Edie. Be smart._ She couldn’t be strong, not now. As for _smart_ — how? She had given herself to him in the first place. She had no one to blame but herself. Didn’t she?

“Edith? Edith, tell me what you need.” 

She swallowed hard. Hot tears slipped off her jaw, leaving small damp circles on the sleeve of her nightdress. 

_Be strong, Edie. Be smart._

“Please don’t leave me alone today.”

 

Lucille was nothing if not dedicated. She stayed with her while she wrote in the library, and, when Edith put down her pen and slumped over from the headache that bored its way through her skull, she came behind her and pulsed her shoulders with her fingers. Edith breathed out and leaned back against her. The pain was in her temples — hard, like a railroad spike. After a moment, she removed her spectacles and turned her head to the side to lay her cheek against Lucille’s stomach. 

Lucille stiffened against her and then stroked her hand along the side of Edith’s neck, up along her jaw. Edith closed her eyes, her writing long forgotten, and breathed in the scent of her: something like faded roses, so different from the scent of her husband.

“I’m cold,” she murmured. The ache was behind her eyes now, almost a vibration. She groaned and covered them. Lucille left her with a rustle of fabric and knelt down in front of her. She laid the back of her hand on her forehead.

“You’re sweating,” she murmured. 

“So cold…”

Lucille stood and took Edith’s hands. “Come upstairs,” she said softly. “Let me run you a bath.”

Anxiety curled Edith’s belly into knots. “I don’t want — what if he comes down — don’t want him to find me — find us —”

The last thing she was aware of was the horrified pity in Lucille’s eyes, and then the world was tumbling out from beneath her, the ceiling going red and finally inky black.

 

Running water. Heat against her skin, like steam. Voices.

She opened her eyes and found herself on the floor of the upstairs bathroom, wrapped in a blanket from downstairs. Lucille and Thomas knelt on either side of her; Thomas was stroking her hair back from her face. The bath was being filled.

“There she is,” he murmured. She turned her face away.

“What’s happened to me?”

“You fainted,” Lucille said gently. “I took you upstairs. Thomas,” she added, “would you get her her dressing gown?” 

“Are you sure —”

“Thomas,” Lucille repeated. “Her dressing gown. And some towels. And perhaps some food as well. Something light.” She found Edith’s hand and squeezed it gently. “You need a bath, some food, and then rest.”

Edith shook her head furiously. “Don’t want to go to bed —”

“Lucille, I’ll stay with her, you —”

_“No!_ ” Edith felt like a specimen mounted on the wall beneath both their gazes. “No, Lucille can stay with me. It’s all right.” Thomas looked as though he were about to argue, but Lucille gave him a pointed look, and he nodded and left the bathroom, casting a final look back at them over his shoulder.

Lucille held out her hands to Edith. “Show me you can stand up,” she said softly. It was difficult with her legs so weak beneath her, but Edith managed it. She leaned heavily on Lucille and buried her head in her neck.

“I can’t do this anymore,” she whispered. “I can’t go near him, I can’t let him touch me, I can’t —”

“I know, I know —”

“He told me he loved me!” 

“I know —”

Edith yanked up her sleeve, revealing the bruises around her wrist. “Do you call this love?” She pulled up her nightdress past the point of modesty to show Lucille the angry crescents on the inside of her left thigh. “And this?”

Lucille stared at her thigh, white-faced and horrified, and Edith realized that she hadn’t understood as much as she’d assumed. To her surprise, she let out a choked sob and covered her face with her hands. 

“He’s never been like this before,” she said, shaking her head. “He’s never been —” She broke off.

“Cruel?” Edith finished the sentence for her. The other woman didn’t look at her. The bathroom was silent save for the burbling of the bath. Steam curled off the trembling surface of the water as it neared the brim. She dropped her skirt and shut off the water, plunging them into further silence. 

“I thought he was different,” Lucille whispered. She took her hands from her face and leaned wearily against the wall, gazing trancelike at the opposite wall, past Edith’s head.

“He’ll be back soon,” Edith said anxiously. 

The words seemed to snap Lucille out of her trance. She went to her and lay her hands on her shoulders. Edith reached up to thread her fingers with Lucille’s, pulling her flush against her own body. She felt another wave of lightheadedness and was glad for the physical support. 

“I see too much of myself in you,” Lucille was saying, all in a rush. “I know what it’s like to fear whoever raises their hand to you, to doubt your senses, to be hurt. May I?” Her hands hovered half an inch from the buttons of Edith’s nightdress. Edith nodded jerkily and watched her start on them. “Nobody fought for me,” Lucille said, eyes on her work. “But I’m going to fight for you.” 

Edith tilted her chin up and kissed her hungrily, but her lightheadedness returned and she pulled away, paling. Lucille saw and made quicker work of her buttons, then helped her step out of the dress entirely; Edith barely had enough energy to blush as it puddled around her ankles. The cold air made her break out in gooseflesh, nipples hardening to the point of pain, and she crossed her arms over her chest to hide how her ribs protruded. She had lost so much weight. Lucille helped her into the bath — water deliciously hot — and held onto her hand, her eyes fixed past Edith as though afraid her gaze would offend her. 

“Why do I feel so safe with you?” Edith whispered. 

She hardly moved, but Edith was aware of her desire. It showed in her parted lips, the darkness of her eyes. She tilted her head forward enough to bring their lips together, then took one of her hands and brought it to her bare breast, which seemed as shrunken as an old woman’s. But her body wasn’t old, and her heart fluttered at the pang between her legs and the now open want in Lucille’s face. 

“I’m tired of hurting,” Edith whispered and rested her head on Lucille’s shoulder. Lucille stroked her hair and hummed some bar of music that seemed familiar, perhaps something that her own mother had sung to her when she was a child.

“I won’t hurt you again,” Lucille said softly. Edith pushed her hand from her breast, down beneath the water. She closed her eyes and lifted her hips against the caress, kissed her again. She didn’t know what possessed her; surely last night should have destroyed all desire within her, and yet here she was, desperate for more, more, more… 

“Will you meet me tonight?” Lucille added even more quietly. “By the stairs outside your room? Quickly, he’ll be —”

She withdrew her hand — Edith swallowing a soft moan of protest — as Thomas ducked inside the bathroom, spare towels in hand and her dressing gown draped over his arm. Edith didn’t look at him, merely crossing her arms more tightly around herself in a cheap attempt to place a barrier between him and her body. She didn’t meet his eyes. Surely he would see Lucille’s wet velvet cuff and know… 

“How is she?” he asked Lucille, laying the towels down beside the bath. 

“Ill,” Lucille said, turning back to Edith who, right on cue, felt another wave of nausea rush through her. “I think we may need a doctor.” Thomas sighed and said something, but Edith wasn’t listening. Instead, through the distractions of her illness, she’d caught Lucille’s eye and nodded very slightly. 

She was rewarded by the hungry sweep of Lucille’s eyes down the ruin of her body.

 

A doctor was summoned. He took her vital signs, checked her eyes and tongue, and asked her questions about her diet, her daily habits, her symptoms. His delicate inquiry _as to intercourse, Lady Sharpe_ , made her cast an uncertain glance at Thomas, who stood near the door, looking uneasy. But then, of course he would. All that had to happen was for the good doctor to make a few inconvenient connections, and then his life was ruined. Nevermind that hers was already.

Thomas nodded to her. She didn’t know how to interpret that, so she said, “I leave such matters to the discretion of my husband.” The doctor cast a glance of his own at Thomas, who coughed.

“Once or twice a month,” he said. A safe answer. Simple. “Less so since she fell seriously ill.”

Impersonally, the doctor examined her breasts and other sundry parts of her anatomy. She watched for any sign of surprise when he ran across the nail marks on her thigh, but the doctor’s expression remained stoic. When he’d finished with her, she pulled the covers more tightly around herself. Her body felt wasted, hard, and white, like bleached bones in the desert. 

The doctor was packing his leather bag. The sight reminded her of Alan, which in turn made her homesick. 

“I understand your concern,” the doctor was saying to Thomas. “The symptoms have manifested perhaps a little earlier than usual. But there’s no doubt about it. You’re to have a child. Allow me to offer my congratulations.”

Edith’s gorge rose again.

 

With the weight of the news and her own fear of the man sleeping so close beside her, it was difficult to rise from her bed that night, but she managed to make it out of the bedroom to the foot of the stairs where Lucille was waiting with a candle, her long hair hanging around her hips. 

“He told you?” Edith said weakly. She’d spent the rest of the afternoon crying, with Thomas trying helplessly to comfort her. _It’ll be all right, you’ll see; don’t worry; don’t you see, this is what we need? Shhh, shhh…_

Lucille nodded soberly and took her hand. “Whatever you need.”

She looked back at the door of the master bedroom. “Will he come to you—?”

But Lucille shook her head. “He thinks I’m furious with him.”

“Because of the baby?”

“Because he lied to me,” Lucille said. “We won’t be disturbed.”

 

She helped her up the stairs to the attic, letting her pause for breath when she needed it, stroking her hair and saying nothing when Edith began to cry. 

In the attic, Lucille turned to her again. “We don’t have to do this if you don’t —”

Edith kissed her before she could say anything more. “Please,” she said between kisses. “I need this. I need to be alone with you. Like this.” 

Lucille backed up against the table in Thomas’s workshop, kissing along Edith’s jaw, up to her right ear. All at once, she picked up Edith up and swung her around onto the desk. Several blueprints scattered onto the ground; neither of them made a move to retrieve them. Part of Edith enjoyed the vindictiveness of it, to have her there where he’d work, where he’d be every day, _God_ , she almost hoped he’d find out…

Kisses to her cheeks, her eyelids, Lucille’s hand straying down her side, over her thigh, reaching further down to hitch up the hem of her skirt and run upward over her calf and up to her knee. Her hair was even darker than usual in the moonlight that spilled like milk from the window behind them, and it felt like silk under Edith’s fingers when she ran them through it.

“I’ve dreamed of this,” Lucille murmured, pressing her forehead against Edith’s. 

“Yes.”

She was holding her skirt in both hands. “May I?” 

“Yes.” It was the only word she could find it in herself to say. She lifted up her arms as Lucille helped her off with her nightdress, then became instantly conscious of how thin she’d become. Her protruding ribs and shrunken breasts. And to think: once, she had been a belle of New York society. Rose petals and cream. And now, barely flesh and bone. 

She kissed Lucille again to push away the ugly thoughts. “Promise me that you’ll tell me the truth,” she whispered. 

Lucille, kissing down her throat: “I promise.”

“Never lie to me.”

“I promise.”

Edith tugged at the laces of Lucille’s nightgown until it hung around her elbows, exposing her scarred, milk-white breasts, still full, still beautiful. By comparison, Edith felt rotted and hollow. At the gentle pressure of her hands on her shoulders, Edith lay back across the desk, shoving more papers out of her way

But Lucille leaned forward, one knee on the table as though she were about to climb on after her, and kissed her open mouth, one hand straying lower and rubbing between her legs. Edith tensed, and Lucille must have felt it because she paused and stroked Edith’s hair back with her other hand. 

“Should I stop?”

Edith hesitated and then shook her head. 

“I’ll be very gentle,” Lucille promised. Edith nodded and kissed her as she replaced her hand. True to her word, she kept her touch light: fleeting caresses that made Edith’s heart race and her body roll forward of its own accord, eager for more. Lucille slid a slender finger inside her; her hand shot down and seized her wrist. 

“No.”

Lucille nodded and took her hand away, but the grim understanding in her face didn’t leave, not even when she slid to her knees and brought her mouth where her hand had been. Her tongue was velvet, warm and wet. Edith covered her eyes with her arm, groaning softly as Lucille quickened the pace of her tongue. She did this differently than Thomas did, but with a strange sort of studiousness, as though she were aware of how he did it and was trying to emulate it. 

Edith pushed her thoughts away and gave herself over to the sensations. Her thighs trembled; her pulse jumped to two, three times its normal speed, slamming within her chest as though she had been dead all this time and had just been revived, like Shelley’s monster. She uncovered her eyes and tilted her head back over the table’s edge so that she could gaze at the stars that hung silver in the dark sky outside the window. She imagined herself as she was: bent back in a white arc over her husband’s work table, her hair brushing the floor, Lucille holding her thighs and her mouth pressed between them. It was immodest, immoral, and deliciously vengeful. 

But beyond that, exorcising.

The edge of the table left a hard indentation above her tailbone. She shifted more firmly onto the table and pulled Lucille up by one hand, sighing as they kissed and Lucille climbed over her, one knee on the table again, one hand between her legs, her nightdress soft against Edith’s bare skin. She could taste herself on her tongue, like the dream she’d had seemingly ages ago. Dragging her lips down her throat, she ran her hands down Lucille’s spine.

She came with a whimper, her head buried between Lucille’s breasts. 

 

“Tell me,” she murmured later as they curled around each other for warmth on the floor of the workshop. Lucille had brought out several of the fur coats from the trunk, spread two out to lie on and the other to cover themselves. The fur smelled of mothballs.

“Where to begin?”

“Tell me the worst.”

Lucille was silent for a time, absently winding one of Edith’s curls around her finger. Edith nestled closer to her. “The ghost you saw in the bathroom,” she said at last, and Edith stiffened against her. Lucille sensed it and ran a comforting hand down her stomach, but the motion just reminded her of the life that was slowly growing within her and made her feel sick, panicky.

“That was our mother,” Lucille was saying. “She’d discovered us — Thomas and I.” She drew a shuddering breath. “I can still see her when I close my eyes. It didn’t kill her outright, you see. I couldn’t get the knife back out. And then the bath overturned, and she was crawling across the floor… the blood everywhere…” She sighed. “The surgeon said I’d nearly split her skull apart.”

Edith was silent where she lay pressed against her. In the darkness, she closed her eyes and breathed in the scent of the wood dust around them. 

“This is what you’ve chosen,” Lucille said at last. “When you chose me. I don’t regret what I did. If I had to make the choice again, I would do the same.”

“I’m not frightened of you,” Edith said, surprising herself with the honesty of it. “Not like I should be. You — you’ve done terrible things. But him… I _know_ that he’ll hurt me.”She shivered. “If he discovers this…”

“Shhh.”

They lay in silence for a while. “I longed for this,” Edith said at last. “Dreamed of it even, like you said.” She flushed in the darkness. But Lucille seemed to sense her feelings.

“Would you think of me?” she whispered as her fingers traced over her stomach and down between her thighs again. “When you did this, did you think of me?”

Edith looked over her shoulder to where she knew Lucille was. Her eyes glittered like planets. “Did you think of me?” she breathed. 

“All the time,” she said and kissed her. “When he’d come to me,” she said between kisses, “when we made love — I had to keep myself from calling for you, at times —” She gasped as Edith slid her own hand down to her bud, caressing her gently. Lucille cupped her breast and bent her head down to suck on her nipple. 

“Do you love him?” Edith whispered. Lucille looked up.

“What?”

“I asked, do you love him?”

Lucille sighed. “It’s not that simple, Edith. He’s — he’s all I’ve ever had. I’ve spent my entire life protecting him. This isn’t something that I can throw away… as though it never mattered. What about you? Do _you_ love him?”

Edith relocated her hand to Lucille’s waist. The moment for passion had passed. 

“I wish I didn’t,” she said. “I wish I could tear my own heart out sometimes. Feeling nothing seems… so much easier.” She sighed. “I can’t do this,” she said. “I can’t be a mother. I don’t want to give birth, I don’t want to raise it — not when it’s _his —_ ” She broke off, her mind racing beyond the powers of her tongue.

Lucille kissed her lightly on the lips and smoothed her hair back. “Come here,” she whispered, gathering Edith close. “Let me do this for you, at least.” She ran her hands over Edith’s breasts. “You’re beautiful.” She breathed the words. 

“No,” Edith said. “I’m not.”

Lucille ran a hand through her hair as she shifted so that she was atop again her again. “Our sort of beautiful, then,” she said. 

 

Lucille saw her to the bedroom again, but Edith stopped short outside the door. She didn’t want to go in again and face the reality of her marriage, risk her husband’s waking and his anger. She didn’t want to see him again for fear of what it might bring. 

“Be brave,” Lucille whispered. Edith pressed her finger to her lips. Her fear must have shown on her face because Lucille pulled her close, tucking her chin over her head. She felt safe, cared for. Something she did not feel when she lay beside Thomas. Lucille knew. Lucille understood. 

She couldn’t tell if he was asleep or not when she slipped back into the bedroom. His back was turned to her, his breaths slow and even. How often had she feigned the same thing when he was returning from his own encounters with Lucille?

What had she become?

**Author's Note:**

> My Crimson Peak blog is @beautifulfragilethings. My main is @williamshakennotstirred.


End file.
